Mogul Glad to Be Home From Maccabiah Games

A veritable United Nations of warmup suits in Pamela Mogul’s hall closet testifies to her whereabouts for the better part of July. The garments bear the colors of Mexico, France, Brazil and Argentina as well as the USA, souvenirs of her summer adventure in Israel. One year after her ability to walk was compromised by an accident, she served as men’s and women’s tennis coach at the 16th Maccabiah Games, which were staged under the threat of terrorism.

“I’m glad I went, but I’m also glad I’m home,” Mogul said Thursday in her Manhattan apartment approximately 72 hours after the American delegation participated in the closing ceremonies at Jerusalem before being whisked to the airport and its charter flight to New York.

The competitors and administrators had been surrounded by armed guards for much of their stay, and the presence of machine guns, even on the buses, was a reminder of the peril associated with life in the Middle East. Not a few hearts skipped a beat at the sight of a helicopter descending onto the field and the sound of fireworks signaling an end to the Olympic-style competition.

Because of a rash of bombings this spring, there had been discussions about postponing the quadrennial showcase for Jewish athletes. In the end, the Games went on although with fewer events and trimmed-down rosters. Lenny Krayzelburg, a native of the Ukraine who became a U.S. citizen in 1995 and won three gold medals in swimming for his adopted country at the Sydney Olympics, triumphed in his specialties, but there wasn’t much depth on any of the teams entered.

“We were supposed to have 12 people on the team but only seven came,” the coach said. Injuries reduced the women’s basketball team to six healthy bodies, augmented by a pair of Israelis.

“Basketball was my first sport,” said Mogul, who is 36. “I mentioned to the basketball coach that I was a decent player, that I thought I could keep up. The day before the first game I went to practice and saw how physical it was. When I had my operation last year, I was told it would take two years for my body to heal. I didn’t think it was worth the risk of paralysis. Too bad. It would have been a blast. They came home with a silver medal, too.”

Mogul wasn’t sufficiently recovered to give the players on her tennis team a good game. “I can’t hit out much now,” she said. But she’s already come a long way since her bicycle was struck by an SUV in Florida, where she was teaching tennis on Longboat Key. When doctors in New York examined her MRI, they pronounced it a medical miracle that she was able to walk and prescribed immediate surgery.

A former instructor at the West Side Tennis Club--where she got to work with the likes of Roy Emerson and John Lloyd--who has also taught at the East River Tennis Club in Long Island City, Mogul has supplemented her rehabilitation routine by arranging endorsements and corporate outings for Emerson, Lloyd and others on the senior circuit as well as for Rebecca Lobo of the New York Liberty.

The trip to Israel certainly expanded her horizons. She heard a speech by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, toured Masada and the Dead Sea and slept in a hotel just a couple of blocks from the Tel Aviv nightclub that was reduced to smithereens by a terrorist bomb months earlier.