STAYING POWER : Now on His 3rd Olympic Pentathlon Team, Bob Nieman Keeps Coming Back for More

The vague feeling that the big old two-story frame house with the covered wooden porch would look more appropriate in the Midwest is confirmed with a ring of the doorbell. “Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame . . . “ the doorbell chimes, deep in the heart of Texas.

But there is no answer to the chimes. The note on the door says that Bob Nieman has gone fencing and will be back soon.

True to his word, Nieman is back soon. He has been to fencing practice and to the stables. He parks his dusty riding boots next to the door and makes his way through the not-quite-finished version of a great old house undergoing a face lift.

Nieman is directing the work on the house himself. He’s an architect. That is, he’s an architect when he’s not training for the Olympics. Which he usually is. He has made the Olympic team three times.

Nieman is 40. When he competes next month in Seoul on the modern pentathlon team, he will be one of the oldest members of the U.S. team, just weeks away from 41.

Modern pentathlon? Isn’t that the weird sport with the running, swimming, horseback riding, pistol shooting, fencing--the one every country sends its military men to?

Right. So what’s an architect doing on the team?

Well, Nieman was in the Air Force, training to be a pilot, when he got started in the sport. It was later that he went home to the Midwest to study architecture so he could design buildings like, oh, Fuddruckers. Ever been in a Fuddruckers restaurant? That was one of his projects.

So what’s he doing at the Army’s Ft. Sam Houston, spending his morning on a horse and his afternoon in a sword fight?

Well, it’s a long story. But it has to be told quickly because he still has to run a few miles. And before he gets to the running, he’s going to turn on his VCR and give a friend a quick lesson in how to do TV commentary on the modern pentathlon.

Nieman, who writes novels as a hobby, is more than happy to tell the tales of his years in and out of this unusual sport. He develops all plots and subplots in his own order, and chronology constantly gives way to commentary. He realizes that the average American can’t name the five pentathlon events, but he says it’s a pretty fascinating sport that could catch on.

Making the sport more “broadcastable” is one of his top priorities, now that his competitive days are numbered. Nieman found, when he helped with the telecast of the sport at the ’84 Olympics for ABC and at the 1986 Goodwill Games for the TBS network, that the point system was too convoluted to lend itself to drama. He’s lobbying to change that.

He plans to become a champion of the sport, so to speak, helping with funding, public relations, recruiting. He would like to recruit swimmer Rowdy Gaines to the modern pentathlon. Gaines doesn’t know about it, though. Nieman figures that if Gaines can swim the way he did this year in a comeback at 29, surely he’s in good enough shape for the run. Just have to teach him to fence, shoot and ride. He seems like a bright enough guy.

Nieman thinks Gaines would give the sport a boost.

During the 1984 Olympics, Nieman went all out to help ABC present the history of the modern pentathlon, which is based on the skills of a Napoleonic warrior. Every time he does an interview, Nieman has to explain why the sport is called modern. But he does it, for the umpteenth time, with a flair.

The original pentathlon, he explains, was included in the Olympic Games so that the Spartans would have a competition for their warriors. The five events in ancient Greece were the broad jump, javelin, 200-yard sprint, discus and wrestling--some say wrestling to the death.

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin modernized the pentathlon for the Games at the turn of the century, he drew upon his own image of what the all-around warrior should be and came up with the notion of a courier. He would have to be able to mount any horse drawn from the line and ride it over rough terrain and obstacles (a 600-meter steeplechase); he would have to be able to run (4,000 meters) and swim (300 meters) in case the horse was shot out from under him, and he would have to be able to fight his way through enemy lines with sword or pistol.

The baron’s background is reflected in the sword and pistol events, with both based upon the rules of gentlemen’s duel for honor.

In pistol competition, a target silhouette of a man, set at dueling distance, turns to face the competitor, who has time to take aim and fire. In epee fencing, a bout ends as soon as one touch is scored, in keeping with the tradition of “first blood.”

Nieman has not had a life of leisure to train for this discipline. Nor is he a lifetime military man, as are most of the competitors of the past, dating back to George Patton.

Nieman is the modern pentathlon’s thoroughly modern athlete. And he’s as diverse and intriguing as the sport itself.

He says he’s able to train full time because his wife, Susan, works as sales manager for a San Antonio radio station. He jokes, “Please don’t tell her that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be done. I like being a kept man.”

The hours he spends training every day have become an integral part of his life, even though when he left Hinsdale (Ill.) High lo, those many years ago, he put academics ahead of athletics.

Nieman was a swimmer in high school, an eight-time All-American and twice the state champion in the 100- and 200-yard freestyles. He even spent some time training at Santa Clara at the same time as Don Schollander and Mark Spitz. But instead of choosing a college that would develop his swimming, he chose the academic emphasis of the Air Force Academy.

He graduated in 1970 with a degree in aeronautical engineering and went into pilot training. By January, 1971, though, he was missing sports. And he had that nagging feeling that he had never reached his potential as a swimmer. He asked the Air Force to let him train for the 1972 Olympics.

That decision was in the hands of Wayne Baughman, head of the athletic department at the academy. He checked Nieman’s swimming potential by asking the opinion of former Olympic diver Micki King Hogue, then and now a coach at the academy. She gave him her highest recommendation, Nieman reports with a devilish grin, explaining: “She and I used to double date.”

He then had to choose between swimming and pilot training. He couldn’t do both. So he dropped out of pilot training and went home for some serious swimming training.

“I worked hard and my times dropped,” he said. “But so did the times of everybody else in the world.”

He didn’t make the Olympic team that went to Munich.

“I felt so bad,” he said. “I felt like I had let the Air Force down.”

His chance to be a pilot was gone, too, so he went back into Air Force duty as the guy in charge of a $30-million recreational budget at his base. “I wasn’t an accountant, but I could swim, and that’s recreation, right?”

The next January, Baughman called. Nieman took the opportunity to apologize for not having made the Olympic team.

“But Baughman told me that no one was upset, that they knew I didn’t do it as a boondoggle,” Nieman said. “They knew I had trained seriously. He told me they had two slots for guys to go to San Antonio and train in pentathlon.

“They figured since I could swim, I had one-fifth of it hacked. I figured if those Army grunts could do it, I could learn the rest. But there was one problem. I had already been assigned to go to Turkey for 14 months. It was a short tour because Turkey was considered a remote assignment.

“Baughman tried to get me out of that, but the best he could do was come up with a deal where I could get out of it if I could find someone with my same experience, someone who was an academy graduate, who wanted to volunteer for my assignment in Turkey.

“Right. How likely was that?

“But a few days later, Bruce Fisher called me. He was a swimmer who was a year behind me at the academy. He was calling to tell me that he had gotten the coaching job at the academy, but the bad news was that he couldn’t take it unless he could get his overseas duty out of the way. He needed a short tour. I asked him what he’d been doing. He said he was the head of a recreation budget. I said, ‘Such a deal I have for you . . . ‘

“It was a horrible thing to do to a friend, but it got us both where we wanted to be.”

And a career in modern pentathlon was born.

Nieman arrived at Ft. Sam Houston for his 60-day tryout having never been on a horse, having never done any distance running, having learned all he knew about fencing by watching Errol Flynn, having barely met Air Force qualifications at the shooting range, but ready to swim.

“I figured I’d better really impress them with my swimming, so the first day I was there I broke the world record in the 300-meter swim by six seconds,” Nieman said.

By 1976, he was skilled enough at the other disciplines to win the national title and the Olympic trials. But in Montreal, he finished 26th individually. The U.S. team finish fifth.

He shouldn’t have been too surprised. The United States has never won an Olympic gold medal in the modern pentathlon, team or individual. Still, he was disappointed. That August he not only gave up modern pentathlon, but he resigned his commission as a captain in the Air Force and headed for Notre Dame to study architecture.

In 2 1/2 years he had his degree from Notre Dame and was itching to compete again. And in August, 1979, in Budapest, Hungary, he became the first--and still only--American to win the gold medal in the World Championships. He swam the 300 meters in world-record time. The United States won the team gold, too.

He had finally caught on.

“You have got to spend six or seven years at this to really get to know it,” he said.

So 1980 was to be his big Olympic year. But 1980 was the year of the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games.

Nieman had continued fencing at Notre Dame. He had kept up his world ranking. When he returned to San Antonio, he met Ralph Bender, a fencer who owned an architectural firm. Nieman worked part time for Bender through the Olympic job opportunities program, starting in February, 1979.

He made the 1980 team not only in modern pentathlon, but also in fencing. With a big grin, he reports: “I got to stay home twice in 1980.”

At the ’81 World Championships, he fell off a horse and tore muscles in his leg, but he came back to win the ’82 national title. The ’88 national title, which he won in the process of finishing as the top qualifier for this Olympic squad, was his third.

In his own words, he blew it in the Olympic trials in 1984. He didn’t elaborate, but he indicated that he more or less shot himself in the foot by using an innovative pistol with an electronic trigger that malfunctioned at the last minute. By the time he had adjusted, he had lost too many points.

He caused a little bit of controversy with the pistol, although no one complained that it was illegal.

Perhaps surprisingly, the modern pentathlon has been plagued by more cheating scandals than most other sports. Nieman was there, for instance, when Army Maj. Boris Onischenko was caught with a rigged epee in 1976. And he was called upon to testify when there were allegations of cheating in fencing at the modern pentathlon Olympic trials in 1984. The charge was that friends of Rob Stull had thrown bouts to him.

Nieman shrugs off any outrage, saying, matter of factly, that such charges are often made. He gets more irritated with bad horses. He cites the “nag” the Italians stuck him with once when they said the horse he had drawn went lame while standing in its stall. The nag flat-out refused to jump for him.

“It might sound like a minor thing to say that you have to ride the horse that you draw, a horse that you don’t know,” Nieman said. “But you have no idea what those horses are going to do. You just have to try to get to know them in 20 minutes. I usually start with, ‘Hi, horse. Know any English? Does the word whoa ring a bell with you?’ ”

Nobody said it would be easy. And it beats working. Nieman believes in the adage: “No one should get a job before 30.” His first full-time job in the real world was the one he got with an architectural firm after the ’84 Olympics, when he really thought he was retiring from the sport.

He got that old itch in June, 1987, put in a month of training and finished third in the national competition.

A year later, in the trials for Seoul, he dominated the nationals.

“At my age, it’s hard to train,” he said. “I used to train all 5 sports, 10 hours a day, and then get up and do it again. I can’t do that now.”

Nieman does entire routines on how old he is and how much grief he takes from the younger competitors about his feeble condition. But in a very serious commentary, he shares his motivating factor: His brother, Charlie, who is 36, has been in a wheelchair for more than 10 years with multiple sclerosis. Charlie used to be a swimmer, too. He swam at Foothill College for Nort Thornton, Matt Biondi’s coach at California.

“When I see my brother, it reminds me that we all take so much for granted,” he said. “I am physically able to do this, so I feel almost an obligation to do it.”