I’d always been curious about this Native American blood flowing in my veins, but like most Americans, I felt confused trying to make sense of the legacy of the people who lived in the Americas before Europeans showed up. The stories we were fed as kids, starting with the tale of the happy local Indians showing up in Plymouth for the first Thanksgiving, always had a bogus, Disney-filtered feel to them, yet there was no alternative narrative beyond the famous image of a proud old Indian, Iron Eyes Cody, shedding a tear at the rape of his people’s land. This weeping-Indian image, too, presented pity and guilt in lieu of a real understanding of who these people were and how they lived. There was always a sense that Native Americans had been robbed not only of their land, but of their historical importance as well. Yet, any such thoughts got lost in a gooey, dreamy kind of Indian chic, summed up by those phantasmagorical peyote scenes Oliver Stone tossed into his “Doors” movie.

Charles C. Mann has solved this problem. As he explains in a useful preface to “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” Mann had been waiting, at least since the early 1990s, for someone to publish a book pulling together the wealth of research conducted in recent years to redefine radically how we think of our continent’s history. But no one did. He finally decided that he was going to have to write the book himself. “1491″ is less a self-contained work per se and more an induction ceremony into what, for many readers, promises to be a lifelong obsession with the startling new perspective slowly opening up on this prehistory.

What’s most shocking about “1491″ is the feeling it induces of waking up from a long dream and slowly realizing just how thoroughly one has been duped. We all knew there were problems with the old narrative of brave European settlers crossing the Atlantic to find an empty continent, but it’s jarring to discover, as Mann tells us, that in 1491 there were almost certainly more people living in the Americas than in Europe — and that, in many ways, American civilizations of the time were as advanced as anything across the ocean.

We were taught in school that nomadic peoples scampered across a land bridge over the Bering Strait roughly 12,000 years ago during the last Ice Age — so how could such thriving societies have developed in the relatively short period of time? Mann has an intriguing explanation, which even in the time since his book went to press has been echoed in press accounts of new findings in science: The old narrative was probably wrong. It now appears likely that even if people did move across the Bering Strait then and make their way south, they did not find an empty continent. Recent discoveries at a place called Monte Verde in southern Chile indicate that early humans were there at least 12,800 years ago.

“All of this is speculative, to say the least, and may well be wrong,” Mann sums up. “Next year geologists may decide the ice-free corridor was passable, after all. Or more hunting sites could turn up. What seems unlikely to be undone is the awareness that Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years.”

Let that time frame sink in a minute. Then think about what was going on over on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Given that the Ice Age made Europe north of the Loire Valley uninhabitable until some eighteen thousand years ago, the Western Hemisphere should perhaps no longer be described as the ‘New World,’” Mann writes. “Britain, home of my ancestor Billington, was empty until about 12,500 B.C., because it was still covered by glaciers. If Monte Verde is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.”

For comparison’s sake, new research out of Germany indicates that Europe’s earliest civilization existed nearly 7,000 years ago and was centered on what is now Dresden, Germany. This early European civilization, if that is the name for it, lingers on in the shape of more than 150 earthen temples discovered in Germany, Austria and Slovakia, but researchers are only in the first stages of figuring out who the people were who built them and how they lived.

“It’s hard to say what they were,” Christoph Heiermann, a spokesman for the Archaeological Heritage Service and State Museum for Prehistory in Dresden, told Salon. “They were central locations for the people, certainly. Maybe they were market squares, and served for some kind of rites, but we don’t know that. We don’t even know who the people were. We have no written sources from that time. There must have been some central organization that was able to organize people to do that, but we don’t know if they had a chief or a king or some sort of parliament.”

Networks of massive man-made mounds were also one of the defining characteristics of a city-state called Cahokia, not far from present-day St. Louis. Cahokia was advanced enough in the period from 950 to 1250 A.D. to have at least 15,000 inhabitants (“comparable in size to London,” Mann notes) and to build massive mound structures, including one called Monks Mound. “Its core is a slab of clay about 900 feet long, 650 feet wide, and more than 20 feet tall,” Mann writes.

Further excavation and analysis may provide more answers about Cahokia and the many other historical riddles Mann explores, or it may not; uncertainty pervades all research in this general area, and Mann is wise enough not to run from the doubt. Instead, he weaves it through his portraits of groundbreaking researchers and theorists to turn their stories into mini-mysteries. That is, he makes you wait before you see how the volume of evidence stacks up, and often takes you first through alternative theories that turn out not to have had legs. This works because Mann has a knack for explaining complex ideas in crisp, clear language; he almost never lapses into the kind of geek-having-fun speak that can sometimes make science writing cloying.

Mann is especially good on the subject of Native American agriculture. In 2003, in a piece that was chosen for an annual collection of the best science writing, he presented the startling notion that the Amazon rain forest has for so long been so thoroughly — and so skillfully — manipulated by Amazonian Indians that it probably makes sense just to go ahead and call it a work of art. He covers that territory here as a well, making a persuasive case that our predecessors in the Americas used fire in far more creative ways than has been understood up to now. Soil scientists marvel at the existence of a very rich, dark soil in the Amazon called terra preta de Indio. This, it turns out, is largely man-made. The fruit trees that are so plentiful in the Amazon? Planted by man. According to a recent study cited by Mann, the Indians living in the lower Amazon were growing more than 138 crops as far back as 4,000 years ago. One Spanish expedition into the Amazon in the 1540s came across a settlement so large and developed, its homes and well-tended gardens lined the river for more than a hundred miles and hundreds of thousands of people showed up to greet the visiting foreigners.

The most remarkable accomplishment in the Americas may be the development of maize, which has since spread throughout the world. Mann details a dispute between different factions arguing over just how maize came into existence, but both sides agree that this development began more than 6,000 years ago in southern Mexico, probably in the highlands. Mann cites Nina Fedoroff, a geneticist at Pennsylvania State University, who wrote in 2003 that maize was “arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”

So corn, that great symbol of the American heartland, turns out to be an ingenious triumph of man over nature. What about the great herds of bison that European settlers found swarming over the Great Plains? Surely these had been there going back many millennia? Actually, no. Mann makes a persuasive case that North American Indians not only created the large grasslands that provided the bison’s ideal habitat — which foolish visiting Europeans assumed had been created naturally — but they also kept the bison population regulated. It was only when the Indian population was decimated by wave after wave of epidemic in the years after the dirty, disease-ridden Europeans showed up that the bison herds propagated wildly. “Hernando De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn’t see a single bison,” Mann writes. “When Indians died, the shaggy creatures vastly extended both their range and numbers … The massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again.”

Bison herds as pathological outbreaks, the land-based equivalent of red tides in the Gulf of Mexico? Mann does it again and again, slipping in so many fresh, new interpretations of American history that it all adds up to a deeply subversive work: Our national self-conception is built around our roots as a European spinoff, one allowed to evolve on its own thanks to the happy accident of discovering this big, bountiful vacant lot known as North America. This whole notion of an empty continent just sitting there waiting for a collection of religious fanatics, adventurers and outcasts to drift on over from Europe and reinvent themselves as pilgrims and pioneers was always problematic, but it has retained its place in our history books.

Indians, robbed of their history and deprived of their voices, have never made much headway against the pretty myth of their existence: enlightened simple people living in gentle harmony with nature, ever careful not to disrupt their surroundings. In fact, as Mann carefully lays out for us, they remade their surroundings in profound ways that never occurred to Europeans. The Amazon rain forest as giant orchard — if it’s true, and few who give Mann a fair and thorough reading will doubt that it is, that would make the Amazon humanity’s greatest creation.

“Of the 138 known domesticated plant species in the Amazon, more than half are trees,” Mann explains. “Sopodilla, calabash, and tucuma; babacu, acai, and wild pineapple; cocopalm, American-oil palm, and Panama-hat palm — the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts and palms is justly celebrated. ‘Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees,’” an anthropological botanist tells Mann. “‘That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.’”

The first Europeans to visit the Americas were often more willing than their descendants to give credit where credit was due. The conquistador-turned-priest Bartolome de Las Casas, for example, “repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place  ‘a beehive of people,’ as (he) put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people ‘that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.’” Las Casas estimated the toll of Spanish disease and violence at more than 12 million, and then kept upping his estimate — later settling on 40 million. It was only later on that people took to casting such figures as exaggerations, all the better to avoid difficult questions about where the perpetrators of this calamity rate on the all-time list of historical criminals.

The American Revolution was at its core an extension of European values, but Mann finds it interesting to look at the ways that context helped create a new American identity. “Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality,” Mann writes. “Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper … Historians have been puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge this contribution to the end of tyranny worldwide. Think of I. Bernard Cohen claiming that Enlightenment philosophers derived their ideas of freedom from Newtonian physics, when a plain reading of their texts shows that Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine took many of their illustrations of liberty from native examples. So did the Boston Colonists who held their anti-British Tea Party dressed as ‘Mohawks.’”

Mann asks what it would be like to be sent whirling back through time to 1491 to meet up face to face with a member of the Haudenosaunee, whose progressive constitution — forged before the Europeans ever reached North America — stands as a marvel of early public policy. “Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?”

Okrent was not an obvious choice for the highly visible role of second-guessing the Times in its own pages. He had only minimal newspaper experience, although he had been the managing editor of Life magazine and the editor of new media for Time Inc. He is also the author of “Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center” and the baseball book “Nine Innings.” No Times public editor could escape criticism and confrontation, but Okrent never shied away from controversy.

In his first column, he wrote, “I believe the Times is a great newspaper, but a profoundly fallible one.” His brusque style was not to everyone’s taste, but there was freshness and bravery in his approach, and his biweekly dispatch, “The Public Editor,” had a way of reinforcing a reader’s insight into the paper’s quandaries. Interviewed at his office in the Times Building on West 43rd Street, just before he packed up his books and belongings, Okrent made clear that the criticisms stung at times, but he also wore them as a badge of honor.

The Times took a lot of heat about the “White House Letter” articles by White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller. In one, she seemed to fawn over White House communications director Nicolle Devenish. In another, she wrote about Bush loving baseball. Why the uproar?

What was interesting was, the criticism was from both sides. Bumiller could write a paragraph that would make the Bushies flip out. “How could this person be so disrespectful of our president?” And in the same paragraph — because it was not in the context of issues but of his personality or his hobbies — the anti-Bushies would be screaming, “How can you publish such tripe by someone who is so clearly in the Bush administration’s pocket?” It was ridiculous. Maybe there were things to criticize, but these two different comments displayed more about our culture and a lack of understanding of what that columnist meant to do. I think it’s one of the Times’ problems that they haven’t made it clear to readers what various formats mean.

You wrote, “As for ‘White House Letter,’ it’s part of a longstanding Times’ practice of trying to provide a glimpse into the personal side of newsmakers’ lives. I do think the paper could do a better job of labeling these pieces and making clear that they are not about, nor meant to be about, life-and-death issues.”

I’m not so sure I should have included that last line, because those articles can be substantive. But it’s about the individual reader. If you really hate George Bush, you don’t want to read about his hobbies or that he’s nice to his friends or that he’s good company at dinner.

Or what he has on his iPod.

It just drives people who don’t like him crazy. It would have been the same if there had been a “White House Letter” about Clinton 10 years ago. It’s a misapprehension, I think, of the varied roles that a newspaper has. Now if that were the only coverage of Bush, yeah, sure.

In “Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?” you wrote: “To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.” Do you think that the Times’ prewar reporting on WMD could prove to be a longer-term embarrassment to the paper than the Jayson Blair scandal?

I don’t know if I could speak to comparative sins. It certainly was a very serious case of bad journalism. It was not, to the best of my ability to determine, a case of “I know we’re lying as I write this,” which Jayson Blair was. Here was a guy consciously plagiarizing. Here was a guy who meant to break the rules. The Times did a lousy job on WMD, but I can’t imagine there was anybody in the office saying, “Let’s make up some things.”

But an argument can be made that the paper’s WMD reporting helped lead the country into war.

I’m not saying it’s not a significant issue. I’m saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism.

In that column, you raised questions about Judith Miller, who wrote the controversial WMD stories, and other reporters, noting that they relied on unnamed sources, which can amount to “a license granted to liars.” You continued: “The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source — the offer of information in return for anonymity — is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed.” Do you think the Times made a mistake in not disciplining Miller?

I don’t know that one can say she wasn’t disciplined. They don’t reveal personnel matters to me. For all I know, she was disciplined. For all anyone knows, she was disciplined. Only Judith Miller and Times management know for sure.

You wrote: “The editors’ note to readers will have served its apparent function only if it launches a new round … of aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe Hussein had W.M.D. at his disposal.” A year later, do you think the Times follow-up reporting has been up to that standard?

There was one really good long piece by Michael Gordon. But I don’t think it was enough. I think they could have done more.

Should reporters show more skepticism about U.S. military claims? For example, Richard A. Oppel Jr. recently reported that a “Marine task force swept through a wide area of western Iraq near the Syrian border, killing 100 insurgents … American military officials said.” Shouldn’t the reporter be more skeptical about whether those 100 people killed really were insurgents?

I would have to know who the officials were and Oppel’s history with those officials, and whether they were reliable sources and whether he did cross-confirming with other officials.

But you read the piece.

Yes. There’s not enough in the story for me to say that he wasn’t sufficiently skeptical. Maybe he was.

Do you think the Times has reported aggressively enough on civilian casualties in Iraq?

No. I think on civilian casualties they could do more. It’s actually something I’ve discussed with the editors involved. They’re aware of it, and I’m hopeful that there will be more reporting on that.

This February, you wrote again about Judith Miller, mentioning her appearance on ”Hardball With Chris Matthews.” On the show, she said sources were telling her that “the Bush administration ‘has been reaching out’ to the Iraqi political figure Ahmad Chalabi to offer him expressions of cooperation.” She continued: ”According to one report, he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government.” That column took a strong stand against reporters playing pundit. You mentioned vanity as one motivation. Is that enough to explain reporters — who so often ridicule pundits for superficiality and pomposity — wanting to become pundits themselves?

If such people exist! [Laughs.] I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits. I don’t know if they are the same reporters who then want to become pundits. The Times’ new credibility committee report that was issued on Monday very specifically said they will be putting in a policy that reporters must get permission from their department heads to appear on television, which I think is a really good thing. It was very loose in the past and now they’re tightening it up. Under this new policy, Judy could not have gone on that show without asking permission from her department head.

Was the failure to nail down the fallacy of Saddam Hussein’s WMD an institutional failure that transcends past ones?

That’s hard to know. You can certainly go back to any number of stories — early coverage of Vietnam, the Holocaust — to show the press failing to tell the story. That sort of suggests that it’s the DNA that the press can fail on big stories. Now, I think the likelihood of it failing on something like WMD again is very slight because everybody is aware of how we in the press blew it.

So what does the press do to guard against this happening again?

Keep public editors around, give readers more access to the editors of the paper, constantly challenge itself, and be aware of its own history. Is Jayson Blair going to happen again at the Times? I don’t think so in the foreseeable future. But 50 years from now? Sure. Jayson Blair is going to happen again in the same way that planes are going to crash and volcanoes are going to erupt.

Let’s go back to the “bulge” controversy. Robert Nelson, a photo analyst for NASA, approached the Times and said he was convinced that the bulge on President Bush’s back during the presidential debates was more than “a poorly tailored shirt,” as Bush said. The Times prepared a story and then spiked it. How come?

Well, I wrote about it in my online journal. But what happened is that three Times reporters did a great deal of reporting and had a piece about the bulge that was offered at a news meeting about 10 days before the election. Bill Keller decided not to put it in the paper. That led to a piece by Dave Lindorff that ran in Counterpunch and various other places about the Times spiking a piece that established that this authoritative person, Nelson, had established that Bush was wearing an amplifying device.

So I talked to the authors of the piece and they told me that Nelson never said that there was a listening device. Nelson said there was something there. And that’s a very, very different thing. But the whole Web world went crazy. I made a rather intemperate comment about Lindorff, who I think is a good reporter, saying that he just had it wrong, and that created a response from him and from various others about how I was ignoring whatever I was ignoring.

The issue was: Should the piece have run? Why didn’t it run? What did it say? That’s different from the assertion that it said X, when it did not say X, and was killed because of Y, when it perhaps wasn’t because of Y. It always helps to make a charge when you don’t know the details.

But the White House position was that it was a wrinkled jacket, and so the argument has merit because the NASA expert was saying…

No, no, no, the question was, “Should the piece have run?” I would argue that it should have run. I don’t think it was killed for “we’ve got to protect the president” reasons. I know why it was killed. I talked to Keller about it. He just didn’t think it was that central to what was going on in the last week before the campaign, and he may have — though he wouldn’t say this — thought this is going to introduce something that is only going to make things more complicated, and the piece does not establish — does not establish — that he had it. Now if you ask the writers, they’ll say they wish it had run. They said that on the record and they didn’t lose their jobs. They just disagreed with the editorial decision that was made.

You’ve been pushing for Op-Ed columnists to run corrections. Has that met with resistance?

I’m going to be addressing this topic in my last column, which will run May 22, so I don’t want to scoop myself.

Well, how much resistance did you get from Gail Collins, the editorial page editor?

I have to give you a little prehistory. Gail didn’t want me commenting on the opinion pages. I was hired by the news department and, despite the rabid assertions of the Times’ enemies and detractors, the two really have nothing to do with each other. But [publisher] Arthur Sulzberger decided that I should be able to comment on the editorial pages as well, so it began with Gail being understandably leery: “Who is this person who is going to pass judgment on opinions?”

Then pretty early on in the job, I began to nag a couple of the columnists and Gail about the question of factual errors, or the allegation of factual errors. When I told Gail I was going to write about it, I said, “I want a statement: What’s the policy? Why don’t you have a policy?” And then she gave me a policy and I quoted from the policy in my column and I ran it in its entirety in my Web journal.

It’s a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions. I’ll illustrate it: William Safire continued to refer to an al-Qaida’s leader’s connection to Saddam Hussein. The various government reports said there was no connection. Safire kept writing that there was a connection. Many people challenged him on it. I went to him on it. He said, “I know there’s a connection.”

Well, who is to say? Just because this report said so doesn’t mean that there isn’t a connection. He was relying on his sources. Many people thought I was a total wimp for not challenging him and insisting that there be a correction. But if you turn it around, and put it in the context of a Paul Krugman column, when Krugman makes an assertion that he knows to be the case, then in that case the Safire critic would probably defend Krugman. So when is this being motivated by ideology and when is it really being motivated by a quest for accuracy? Those are two different things and so you have to be really careful.

What was the story about Safire’s parting words to you?

It’s about his welcoming words. Safire is sitting in the chair that you’re in now. Arthur brought him in to introduce him to me and he was very friendly. He said, “By the way, feel free to send me any complaints that you get about my column from readers and I will take them in my hand and put them right into the wastebasket.” He said it in a very pleasant voice with a smile on his face. I said to him, “Well, I don’t want to put you to the trouble of doing that.” It was fine. He answered me when there was a factual challenge. He would reply.

In your column “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” you answered, “Of course it is.” Talking about the Op-Ed page, you said that “you need an awfully heavy counterweight to balance a page that also bears the work of seven opinionated columnists, only two of whom could be classified as conservative.” What did you mean?

That the Op-Ed page is very important in readers’ and the nation’s perception of the Times, the perception of its editorial positions, and of its implicit editorial positions as expressed by the publisher’s choice of people who are given the freedom to write opinion columns. That page is taken to be the Times and therefore is seen by many critics on the right as proof that the Times, in its news columns, is coming from the left. Those are two very different things and I always try to separate them and appraise them on their own.

But I think it’s undeniable that the Times is a liberal paper. Gail Collins and Andy Rosenthal, the deputy editor, and I have badinage about it. “Oh, we’re too liberal for you again?” Of course it’s a liberal editorial policy and a preponderance of liberal columnists.

Can you address the work of the relatively new conservative columnists, David Brooks and John Tierney?

Brooks clearly lines up on the conservative side, but like Safire, he’s a libertarian conservative, not an evangelical Christian. On First Amendment issues and a variety of other social issues, both Safire and Brooks, for instance, came out literally in favor of either gay marriage or civil union.

I think Tierney is also more libertarian than he is conservative in the conventional sense. Tierney is an oppositionist. He’s a contrarian. And particularly in the atmosphere of the Times, I think he’s made a very fine career out of being contrarian. He will write pieces that try to establish why automobile culture is good, why recycling is bad. He picked up Freakanomics for his first or second column because of that contrarian streak. Is he an ideological conservative? I don’t know. I knew him before I came to the Times and I know he’s a contrarian.

A gadfly?

In the context of that editorial page and that Op-Ed page and the general tone of the newspaper, I think that’s an important role to play. It’s very different from William Safire, who had a direct line to various Republican White Houses and to Ariel Sharon’s home. He was deeply embedded in the ideological conservative community.

You have been on a mission to reduce anonymous quotes in the paper. Will that represent your legacy at the paper?

I hope so, I really hope so. Several days ago there was a briefing by a principal in the government, in which he said, as many principals will, very little. It was mostly cliché, empty and anodyne. Someone on his staff was going to give a background briefing and get into more detail. The reporters objected and the briefers decided, OK forget it. And the readers of those newspapers were deprived of what might have been learned. Now, that’s a shame.

However, I think that if the newspapers and broadcast stations stick to their guns, those kinds of incidents will pass. Because those briefers want their story to get out, and if their only way to get the story out is to put it on the record, we will see, in time, their coming around and putting it on the record.

A point you’ve made in your column is that reporters should think more for themselves. Rather than just go to expert A and B, they should have room for some synthesis to draw on their own expertise.

Right, but there’s expertise and then there’s inside information. And I think we have to make a distinction. Let’s say that you have somebody at the Treasury Department who is going to be briefing on changes in tax policy. It’s not his expertise that you care about. You get the expertise from elsewhere. You pull that together as a reporter. But if he’s going to tell you what the Treasury Department is going to do, or what the Bush administration is going to do, then that’s important stuff.

Except the official is usually spinning you. Normally he’s trying to set you up with a plausible scenario, hoping you’ll bite on it.

Yes, there’s much of that. But that’s not all that goes on. Even your most maligned source, the one who wants only to spin, will at times have things to tell you that you want to know.

But, for example, in the case of the Bolton nomination, you definitely have reporters who will call their sources and report, “said one administration official,” or “one Republican official.” That’s an anonymous source speculating on how the fight over the nomination is going to work out.

Right, I hate that. It’s terrible. That’s the thing that I think should end. You should at the very least indicate as much as you can about the source and what the motivation is. I’d like it to say, “said one Republican source who is carrying the administration’s water for the Bolton nomination.” Or, “one Democratic source who is doing whatever he can to sabotage Bolton’s candidacy.” Tell us as much as you can and tell us the motivation.

Sometimes reporters plug in quotes from an anonymous source to show they’ve made the calls and done their work.

And I think that just showing you’ve made the calls is a silly convention left over from much of old journalism because it doesn’t really show that you’ve done anything if you have an anonymous source. I find this in reader e-mail over and over again: Readers don’t believe it. They think that the reporter either made it up, or has made selections to serve the reporter’s own interests. I don’t think that’s happening most of the time, or nearly most of the time, but if readers think it’s happening, then you’ve got a big problem.

What was your first day on the job like?

God, do I even remember my first day? The first things that I have memories of is that I went to the department heads meeting. It was not unfriendly, but there was an edge. They didn’t know me. I didn’t know them. I was probably being a little cocky, which I do when I feel that I don’t know what I’m talking about. There was a little bit of mutual posturing. That first week, I also went to Washington. That was really tough. I sympathize with those Washington figures who have to face 40 Times Washington bureau reporters. They ask hard questions and they’re relentless. And they were quite suspicious and quite dubious about me.

And what do they think of you now?

Well, Phil Taubman, the Washington bureau chief, invited me back this March and said it was time for the exit interview. He told me, and I don’t remember the exact words, “We all survived this. We don’t think you’re a horrible human being.” Now I worry. If people ended up liking me, did I do the job wrong? So I decided they didn’t end up liking me — they ended up being able to deal with me.

– Spike Lee

No one who set foot in the Red Sox clubhouse just after Aaron Boone’s Game Seven, eleventh-inning homer at Yankee Stadium will ever forget what it was like to be there. It almost hurt to be in the room with the Red Sox. It almost hurt to step into the line of sight of hunched-over players staring galaxies away. They all sat around morosely, replaying the mental pictures of that Tim Wakefield knuckler that did not knuckle, the crack of Aaron Boone’s bat and the instant certainty that the ball would land in a throng of bouncing, grinning Yankee fans.

All around the close quarters of the room, men who were paid millions of dollars to play a boy’s game looked as lost as children. They had no idea just how bad the disappointment would be when it kicked in with full force that they had lost Game Seven of the American League Championship Series to the Yankees, and lost it in a way no one in baseball would ever forget.

Their millions could not help them. Call it their dirty little secret: Almost all of them cared far more about winning and losing than they let on. Even for spoiled, pampered, big-league players, a loss like this stung and stung deeply. None of the players moved. Neither did any of the reporters ushered into the room fifteen minutes after the game. It seemed indecent to probe these psyches. It already felt redundant to voice the obvious questions that would reverberate in New England throughout the long, long winter.

Only one man was moving. He went from player to player, and to some he gave hugs, to others a slap on the back. To all of them he offered words of gratitude, delivered with the understated conviction of a man who had accomplished enough in life to save his thanks for special occasions. John Henry did not join some of his players in shedding tears. He had cried joyfully back at Fenway Park when a David Ortiz deep fly fell behind Oakland right fielder Jermaine Dye, sending that playoff series back to Oakland for a deciding Game Five. But for Henry, this was no time for tears; this was a time for duty. He hugged infielder Lou Merloni, red-eyed and disoriented, and drifted toward the clubhouse door, moving like a sleepwalker.

Outside, Henry did not know what to do with himself. He took a few steps toward the dark tunnel leading to the visitors’ dugout, and suddenly stopped. He turned back toward the clubhouse, and thought better of that, too. I approached Henry and asked in a low voice about his circuit around the room. He started to move his jaw, ready to form words, but none came.

Henry and I had spoken often that memorable fall, and I sat with Henry in his private box during the early innings of that wild Game Three with the Yankees, the infamous game where Pedro Martinez stiff-armed Don Zimmer to the ground and all hell broke loose. But now Henry was staring right through me. He was staring right through the concrete walls behind me, like a man who just wanted to know when this sudden dizziness and disorientation would let up enough for him to feel his feet touching the ground again.

The answer, of course, is that it might never. Henry was five outs away from taking the Red Sox to the World Series and having a great shot at becoming the man who killed the curse. It was a Red Sox owner, Harry Frazee, who sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees on January 5, 1920, offering an intoxicating story line to stitch together more than eight decades of Red Sox teams finding colorful ways to fall short of winning the Series. The idea that the Red Sox have been cursed ever since is a romantic notion, a story that gets told and retold until the retelling is the whole idea. To argue over whether the curse exists is to miss the point: It exists if enough people feel that it does. It exists if Aaron Boone of all people can hit that homer to put the Yankees back in the World Series and talk afterward about the importance of ghosts.

John Henry thinks he is a man of fate. He has believed ever since he bought the Red Sox in early 2002 that it was up to him to end the curse. He has known that the only way to do that is to win a World Series. Once Grady Little stuck with Pedro Martinez in Game Seven and it all unraveled for the Red Sox, a prevailing view took hold in New England that 2003 was in the end mostly about adding a fresh entry in the long, long roster of disappointments to pull out and work like worry stones. That is how Red Sox fans have been brought up to react, and how they will always react, until their team finally wins another World Series.

Peter Farrelly was probably not alone among Red Sox fans when he said that, six months after the Game Seven disaster, he could not even recall where he was that day, even though he can describe in detail each of the Five Most Painful Sporting Events of his life. “I swear I can’t remember where I was when Grady Little left Pedro in too long,” he said. “I may have been in L.A., maybe Massachusetts, possibly Texas, maybe at a bar, or a hotel room, or home. I really can’t recall. And that’s good. Because it means I’ve learned to block this shit out. I did watch the game. Somewhere. But this is all I recall: I remember never thinking for a moment that they were going to win. I remember being proud that I wasn’t getting sucked in, feeling grown up.”

Farrelly actually picked up the phone late in the game to call one of the nephews he had brought to the August 30 game at Fenway.

“Tommy, protect your heart,” he said.

“They’re gonna win,” his nephew told him.

“Thomas,” Farrelly said. “Protect your heart.”

“They’re gonna win!” Tommy said, louder now.

“Tom — they’re not,” Farrelly said.

“Shut up!” Tommy said. “They are too!”

Farrelly gave it one more try.

“I’m not breaking your balls here,” he said. “I’m doing this for your own good. I’ve been hurt real bad by these guys before, real bad, and I promised myself that they would never, ever again hurt me and or anyone I loved, so I’m telling you, protect your heart.”

Tommy was not persuaded.

“They’re gonna win!” he screamed, and then hung up and went back to sit through a last few minutes of pleasure and hope before Aaron Boone dashed them all with that home run.

John Henry may never take Sox fans closer than they were that night, five outs away from the World Series. The topsy-turvy Game Seven with Pedro Martinez on the mound might have been his one and only shot. But I don’t think so. Based on what I saw during the several months of the 2003 season I spent studying the John Henry Red Sox from up close, helped in the preparation of this book by unprecedented access, I believe the Henry ownership group is really going to do it. That is just a guess. But one thing I picked up in nine years covering professional sports for the San Francisco Chronicle was a conviction that when you have a hunch about a team, or an organization, you’re right often enough to trust your hunches. Bostonians would be unwise ever to go on record with such a prediction, but as an outsider, a Californian of all things, I’m willing to say it here in black and white: The Red Sox will win a World Series on Henry’s watch. It may be this October. It may be next October. It may take several more years. But it will happen.

It will happen because the Henry group, led by fiery Larry Lucchino, has shown an inspired understanding of what the George Steinbrenner-era Yankees are all about. Lucchino came right out and called the Yankees the Evil Empire, and people around the country know what he means. The Yankees are not just a rich organization with the delusion of the rich that the things they buy are all about character. The Yankees are an organization very comfortable using any and every advantage to rub out real competition. One of these advantages is influence over how events on and off the field are presented in the national media.

Flash back to that crazy Game Three at Fenway Park. Pedro Martinez had lost it out there on the mound and thrown at Karim Garcia’s head in a situation that made it way too obvious just what he was doing and why. Don Zimmer had lost it and gone after Martinez, throwing a wide, wobbly left hook before Martinez stiff-armed him and sent him toppling like a pillow in a pillow fight, as Harvey Araton memorably put it in the Times. A group of Yankees probably including Jeff Nelson and Garcia had lost it, and beat up an overzealous member of the Boston grounds crew. A Yankee executive named Randy Levine had lost it, and made the mistake of venting his frustration to reporters without first checking his facts.

“There’s an attitude of lawlessness that’s permeating everything and it needs to be corrected,” Levine said. “The events of the entire day were disgraceful and shameful and if it happened at our ballpark, we would apologize and that’s what the Red Sox should do here.”

This was pure gamesmanship. The Yankees had taken a lead in the series, and they wanted a lead in public opinion, too. They saw a way to deflect some of the attention and sympathy the Red Sox get as the lovable losers everyone wants to see knock off the big, bad Yankees. They knew it would be to their benefit to position themselves as victims. They fully expected the national press to bury the Red Sox, and in the avalanche of negative stories, Red Sox players would have even more trouble shaking off a difficult loss and making a series out of it. The Yankees have won so often before, they use inevitability as a weapon.

That was where Henry, Lucchino and Werner rolled the dice. Baseball’s commissioner, Bud Selig, had issued a gag order directing teams not to comment on the mess that Game Three became. Henry, Lucchino and Werner ignored him. They took the podium for a press conference and fired right back at Levine’s charges. Henry, a man with a dry sense of humor, good-naturedly mocked the Yankees. “I spoke with Randy yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t feel it was necessary for him to apologize for his remarks or for the attack. … I essentially asked him to retract his statements — statements that I thought were irresponsible and probably made in the heat of the moment — and he declined to do so.”

Most papers played the owners’ press conference as a fiasco. The general sentiment was: How dare they? But the calculated bold move was one of the most important developments in the series. People are supposed to be afraid of George Steinbrenner, and many are. Many let themselves be influenced and intimidated by his whims in ways they barely notice. But John Henry showed he had no fear. He served notice that under his leadership, the Red Sox are proud and fierce and, most important of all, undaunted. Teams have ups and downs, and the skeptics might have been right when they said it would take the organization years to dig out from the psychic wreckage of the great disappointment of 2003.

But John Henry and Larry Lucchino didn’t see it that way, and they just might have been in a position to know. They went out in the offseason and upgraded their team by adding bulldog starter Curt Schilling and closer Keith Foulke, and when they fell short in their bid to acquire Alex Rodriguez, George Steinbrenner took great glee in rubbing it in later, once Aaron Boone’s pickup basketball injury prompted the Yankees to swoop in and add Rodriguez as their new third baseman. Henry had once been a part-owner of the Yankees and a friend of Steinbrenner’s. Henry was known for being low key and mild-mannered. But he released a statement reading in part, “Baseball doesn’t have an answer for the Yankees. … Although I have never previously been an advocate of a salary cap in baseball out of respect for the players, there is really no other fair way to deal with a team that has gone insanely far beyond the resources of all other teams.”

This from a billionaire owner of a team with baseball’s second-highest payroll behind the Yankees. Steinbrenner fired back immediately and unforgettably.

“We understand that John Henry must be embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed by his failure in this transaction,” Steinbrenner said. “Unlike the Yankees, he chose not to go the extra distance for his fans in Boston. It is understandable, but wrong that he would try to deflect the accountability for his mistakes on to others and to a system for which he voted in favor. It is time to get on with life and forget the sour grapes.”

This was, in effect, a knee to the groin. Talk about a tabloid headline waiting to happen! But if anything, the exchange confirmed that the Red Sox were setting the tone. They were turning this into a street brawl against the best street brawler around. They were trying to out-Yankee the Yankees, even if it meant turning off a lot of people in baseball, who could stomach one Steinbrenner but not these new Steinbrenneresque upstarts in Boston thumbing their noses at everyone else. The strategy might have struck some as foolhardy, but it reaped instant benefits: Interest has never been higher in the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees.

Brian Cashman, watching the offseason theatrics with fascination, and from one of the best seats in the house, preferred to think of the Henry outburst as mere emotion, rather than part of an “Evil Empire” strategy.

“I wouldn’t turn up the heat,” Cashman said. “You mess with a beehive, you’re going to get stung.”

He let the words sink in.

“I think they are too smart for that,” Cashman added. “The great thing about the fans of Boston is they now have fans running that team, real passionate fans that are smart. But on the short-term stuff, the negative reactions toward things that we might do with an emotional response, that just gets us more emotional. That’s not healthy for everybody else. This is like Russia and the United States — we’re being the United States, they are Russia — it’s the two big superpowers, and now it’s like: How many missiles do we need? We’re going to increase our missiles, and you’re going to increase your missiles. Oh, you got another one? We’re going to increase ours now.”

It’s easy enough to see why Cashman does not like the drift of events. Who can blame him? But his vision of mutually assured destruction, baseball-style, makes a lot of sense. That is just what the Henry group wants. John Henry may once have been a shy and awkward boy too timid to come out and ask the neighbor kids if he could play in a ball game in his own yard, but he’s not making that mistake again. He could not be more involved in this rivalry, and he’s willing to roll up his sleeves and get a little dirty if that’s what it takes. He’s putting himself on the line in just about every way imaginable. If Steinbrenner challenged him to go at it mano a mano, right there between home plate and the pitcher’s mound, John Henry just might surprise people and take him up on it. Imagine the ratings that would get.

Henry and Lucchino know that the old story line of perpetual disappointment had a potency and power that could always find a way to snatch success away from them at the last possible moment. They believe in the power of story. They believe in a narrative’s ability to keep moving itself forward, even when it seems to have spent its force. So they have assembled a baseball club with great pitching and great hitting, and yet they know that the battle cannot be only on the diamond. Their verbal sparring and their Steinbrenner-like spending have helped turn this rivalry into something it never was before: A national happening. Fans in other markets may get tired of the unfairness of it all, but everyone senses that this is building toward a fascinating conclusion. The twists and turns in the rivalry have an off-the-map feel to them, and anything seems possible. As with any media spectacle, people are simultaneously annoyed to have their attention grabbed so aggressively and curious to discover whether the events themselves will live up to the hype.

“That’s what sells our game,” Cashman said. “Now that reality TV is so successful, people are like: Turn on a baseball game, that’s reality TV.”

The off-the-charts intensity and fan interest give the Red Sox just what they have been craving for decades: A fresh context. So the crazier this gets, the happier they are. After all, they know they are the ones willing to steer this rivalry off the road and go smashing through windows and shopping malls like Jake and Elwood Blues. The added intensity pays dividends for the Red Sox. Among other things, it guarantees that if the high-priced Yankee lineup falters against the Red Sox, a Steinbrenner back-page tongue-lashing will never be long in coming. Steinbrenner got the better of Henry in the “Sour grapes!” exchange, but sometimes losing is winning and winning is losing. The “Evil Empire” strategy of throwing everything toward the goal of beating the Yankees might or might not pay off for the Henry ownership, but they are having one hell of a time playing their hand as if they are sure they were going to get the last laugh on Steinbrenner.

Red Sox fans who talk about the decades of pain and disappointment they have suffered are really talking about something else. They are talking about the luxury of caring about something deeply. Nowhere has a deep and abiding attachment to a team been passed from generation to generation the way it has been in Boston. Most sports fans aren’t so lucky. Passion like that has become rare in American life, where allegiances tend to last weeks or months. People move from state to state, picking up new teams and new loyalties and leaving others behind. Fans outfit themselves head to toe in the loud colors of their new team and scream their lungs out — on cue — at state-of-the-art stadiums and arenas. They celebrate their new teams’ victories like a personal entitlement. But do they really know anything about passion without living through bleak times that test their loyalty? New England fans do. Oh how they do.

Reprinted by permission of Atria Books. Copyright © 2004 by Steve Kettman

On Wednesday, Turkey warned the U.S. it would “not tolerate” a strike against Iraq. “We do not want to experience chaos on our borders with unpredictable consequences,” Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz said in a speech. Turkey has been a key ally in the Afghanistan-based war on terror, a majority Muslim country lending not just verbal support but soldiers to U.S. efforts there. Turkish leaders — along with other NATO allies — are angry that the U.S. hasn’t even shared whatever intelligence led Bush to threaten to widen the war beyond Afghanistan.

“So far as NATO has been concerned, we have not been formally informed of any country besides Afghanistan sponsoring terrorism,” Turkey’s ambassador to NATO, Onur Öymen, told Salon Monday in a phone interview. “We know some countries are considered not dependable governments, but we have not heard concretely about any other governments sponsoring terrorism.” Öymen says Turkey has even made an effort in recent days to serve as a go-between, given the frost between Baghdad and Washington, but little had come of that effort so far.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, widely respected in Europe, offered perhaps the most pointed rejoinder to the talk coming out of Washington.

“The international coalition against terror is not the basis to take action against someone — least of all unilaterally,” he told Die Welt in Tuesday’s editions. “All European foreign ministers see it that way. This is why the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’ leads nowhere … An alliance partnership among free democrats can’t be reduced to submission. Alliance partners are not satellites.”

But as passionately as Fischer and other European leaders have spoken out against Bush’s tendency to go it alone, despite his consensus-building efforts after Sept. 11, others in Europe are trying to draw lessons from the latest political rebuff. Rather than seeing U.S. unilateralism as some bad habit the world’s only superpower can be talked out of — or scolded out of — these voices are focusing more on getting Europe’s house in order, so that America has no choice but to listen.

“America is more powerful, Europe is less,” Dominique Moisi, a leading French commentator on U.S.-European relations, said in a phone interview. “Emotions of the Europeans are quite different from the emotions of the Americans. Europe feels that America is the other, despite of the fact that we said we are all Americans, we are all New Yorkers. Nevertheless, America is the other. What happens next all depends on the American strategy. If the Americans were to attack Iraq, and if that attack was not immediately successful, that would necessarily disrupt the coalition.”

Some analysts think Bush’s lack of regard for Europe may be just what the continent needs to show the kind of resolve it often lacks. They point to the way his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming actually helped push that stalled agreement toward greater acceptance. Until Bush rejected the international agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, most experts thought it was in trouble, and unlikely to be adopted by many countries. Since then, the Europeans have surprised their critics — and the White House — by forging ahead with an agreement on pursuing a watered-down version of Kyoto by themselves.

But so far, at least, Europe remains far too weak economically and politically to be taken as a serious force by Bush and his aides, let alone seen as any kind of real partner to be consulted, rather than merely informed of decisions. As the front page of Germany’s influential weekly Die Zeit put it, “With, without or against America — that is not the question. Only an economically strong Europe will find itself heard in Washington.” Those words appeared under an illustration of a giant cowboy hat settling down over planet Earth and over the words “Neue Weltordnung,” or “New World Order.”

The president’s “axis of evil” speech, both in tone and substance, served to bring this point home in Europe with exaggerated clarity. Not only did it lump Iran, Iraq and North Korea together in a style many in Europe consider simplistic and disturbing, it ignored Europe in a way that was dramatically at odds with Bush’s crucial Sept. 20 speech to a joint session of Congress. In September, the White House seated British Prime Minister Tony Blair right next to first lady Laura Bush, as an honored symbol of U.S.-European relations; this time, neither Blair nor Britain was so much as mentioned, and “Europe” popped up only once in the 3,800-word address.

Blair has refrained from defending Bush’s “axis of evil” remarks against European attacks — but he hasn’t joined the attacks yet, either. His foreign minister, Jack Straw, suggested that American voters, not foreign leaders, were the intended consumers of Bush’s tough talk, citing the congressional elections coming up in November. But Blair ally Chris Patten, the European Union’s external affairs commissioner, blasted U.S. foreign policy as “absolutist and simplistic” in an interview published in Saturday’s Guardian.

Most European analysts believe an actual U.S. attack on Iraq remains unlikely, at least in the near future. Even before Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke up on Monday, warning Bush against taking unilateral action against Saddam, it was clear that the United States could pay a severe price in the international diplomatic realm if it let administration hawks dictate its approach to Iraq. That’s not to say that Europeans dismiss such a possibility. But they believe that for it to happen, the Bush administration would first have to engage in energetic diplomacy to sell the need for war — and either persuade the allies to join in the fight, or to agree not to criticize it. Such an effort has been notably lacking so far. The United States has not even taken the basic step of sharing intelligence information implicating Iraq — or Iran or North Korea — in terrorist activity.

If even Turkey has not been consulted, as its NATO ambassador told Salon, it speaks volumes about the gap between administration rhetoric and deeds. As a neighbor of Iraq, Turkey could expect to face a huge problem with its own large Kurdish minority if an independent Kurdistan were to form out of the remains of a collapsed Iraqi state. Not only that, Turkey has the largest army in NATO after the United States, and serves as an important bridge to the Arab world in its role as the only Muslim country in NATO.

NATO allies may be expected to take Bush’s “axis of evil” talk as mere posturing, but it would not be the European way to let words pass without comment. Whether this represents European substance over American superficiality, or merely the European knack for contention, is open to question. What’s undeniable is that a variety of voices seem to be making similar points.

London’s Independent newspaper struck a more mournful note of criticism than most, arguing in a recent editorial that the State of the Union speech showed that Bush had “betrayed hopes of a kinder and gentler globalization.” In what has been a constant refrain across Europe, the editorial wondered why U.S. military action in Afghanistan had not been followed up with similar resolve to rebuild that country and help those around the world who are in need. “Remember when the world was never going to be the same again?” it asked. “When people across the United States struggled to understand what had happened to make their nation the target of such a shocking assault? When sales of the Koran leapt as Westerners tried to learn more about Islam? When George Bush surprised the world with his restrained and considered response to the murder of thousands of his fellow citizens?

“[We have] seen too many examples of how the good intentions of last year have been dissipated. President Bush’s State of the Union address took the campaign against terrorism in the sterile direction of aggression towards the ‘axis of evil,’ naming three unconnected countries, one of which, Iran, has been moving in recent years towards reintegration in the world community.”

But some European leaders insist they will not force the U.S. to treat it as an equal partner until it is one. Hans-Joachim Otto, a leader of the opposition Free Democrats in Germany’s Bundestag, sees German economic weakness, reflected in the reprimand it took last week for deficit spending, as one key to Europe’s depressed international status. He thinks there’s no way out for the continent until Germany — Europe’s largest economy — can grow stronger.

“Bush now goes in a new direction on his policy toward Europe,” he said. “Generally it’s a demand for more burden sharing. I think the Europeans have to accept that the most heavy burden of the Afghanistan war has been on the shoulders of the United States, and a little bit less on the shoulders of Great Britain. Now I think it’s time for the European partners, especially Germany, France and some others, to take on some more burdens.

“For me that’s a tough issue. We all know we need a lot of additional funding for the German army, for the French and British, but that costs lots of money — to be in Kosovo, to be in Afghanistan, and so on. In Germany we don’t have that at the moment. We don’t have additional resources to fund more strategic projects. So at the moment we have to postpone it.”

That means waiting — not just for additional resources, but also for additional respect. For the time being, the common European currency continues to sag disappointingly, compared to the U.S. dollar, and Europe can neither offer robust economic competition nor military capability that is more than a shadow of the American high-tech military. So it will either make the difficult decisions required to solve one or both of these problems, since that’s what it says it wants to do, or it can continue to master the Rodney Dangerfield art of complaining loudly and memorably about not getting enough respect.

But Europe may well have more power than internal doubters believe. The partnership of Tony Blair was invaluable in the early days of the war against terror. The British prime minister was able to argue the case against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and the Taliban in a way the language-challenged, untravelled Texan in the White House could not.

And European Union commissioner Chris Patten says it’s time for Europeans to speak up and keep the Bush administration from launching into “unilateralist overdrive,” adding, “Gulliver can’t go it alone, and I don’t think it’s helpful if we regard ourselves as so Lilliputian that we can’t speak up and say it.”

One of the great disappointments of the Nagano Olympics was the way the American hockey team embarrassed all of us — both on and off the ice. The Americans’ listless performance, coupled with their subsequent trashing of their dorms, helped ensure that the U.S. television audience would see as little actual hockey from Nagano as possible, which may have been the most unfortunate development for hockey in decades.

A crucial opportunity was missed. Nagano was the first Olympics to feature large numbers of NHL players. It was the first time the league decided to suspend play to allow its players to participate in the games. The skill level was unprecedented, which was especially notable given the larger international ice surface that gives players more room to operate.

With the beginning of Olympic hockey Saturday, Americans will get a second chance to see what hockey should look like. The tournament ought to reach a large audience in the United States. Many people will watch hockey games who normally would not, and what they see will surprise many of them. Compared to NHL games, Olympic hockey places much more of an emphasis on skilled players, rather than the kind of old-fashioned grinders seen in the movie “Slap Shot,” and offers a much more exciting, visually satisfying sport than the current brand of NHL hockey.

I saw this in Nagano, only because I was working as CBS Sports’ hockey researcher. It was my job to watch as many games as possible, whether over at the Big Hat arena, or on the multiple monitors set up near my desk. I happened to be seated just behind the glass at Big Hat the night Russian Pavel Bure made the most of the large ice and exploded for five goals against Finland.

Bure shot up the right wing again and again, blowing by any Finns in his vicinity and veering in on net with enough power and grace to evoke thoughts of Michael Jordan in his prime. I covered the NHL for two seasons for the San Francisco Chronicle in the early ’90s, and Bure’s five-goal game in Nagano was the most spectacular display of hockey I have seen. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a good fight, or a player getting slammed into the boards, or a great save, or even a fine poke-check. But nothing thrills like speed, and a game that gives players room in which to skate, and pass, will always make for better visuals than one that’s more about clutching and grabbing and slowing everything down.

The great hockey we can count on seeing in Salt Lake is sure to reignite a long-standing war that has raged for years over hockey’s future direction. The NHL faces a critical turning point, an opportunity to either cast aside years of impotent tinkering with rules changes or stay mired in old ways and doom itself to permanent second-class hockey status. To broaden its appeal, all the NHL has to do is emulate the style of hockey that will be so spectacularly on display in Salt Lake, and play its games on a larger ice surface.

Nothing is more frustrating than watching a league announce a rules change, only to have it all amount to little or no impact on the game itself. Yet that is what has happened with the NHL in recent years under commissioner Gary Bettman. As its fans know, hockey is a great, thrilling sport, one with subtlety and style to match the American trinity of baseball, basketball and football. But in terms of salesmanship, Bettman’s alleged strength, it still has a long way to go.

The simple and decisive solution, discussed with varying degrees of seriousness for years, is clearly an idea whose time has come. It would have been unthinkable as recently as a few years back. An intense battle raged for years between hockey’s traditional constituency north of the border, which rightly fought any dilution of Canadian-style hockey, and those who would modernize the NHL by bringing in European talent and expanding to Sun Belt cities, with no hockey tradition and no appreciation of the grittier aspects of the game. (Then again, as Russian hockey legend Igor Larionov once told me, talking about the giddy crowds in San Jose, Calif., maybe it’s better to have enthusiastic, unsophisticated fans, rather than whole auditoriums full of people who think they know more than the coaches and players.)

But guess what? The modernizers won. Only six of the NHL’s 30 teams are now in Canadian cities. Nine of the league’s teams are now in California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. It probably would be a good thing if fans in these warm-weather markets could be given weekend seminars filled with lectures on the Original Six, repeated screenings of “Slap Shot,” and essay tests in which extra points are given for using the name “Gord.” But that’s unlikely to happen. These fans can be pounded with music and Jumbotron sight gags shamelessly, but what will keep them coming back is exciting, fast-paced hockey, and opening up the playing surface guarantees they will see more of that.

The only real argument against expanding the NHL ice surface is that it gives European players an unfair advantage. But as it has expanded, the NHL has needed to draw on an international talent pool. Just 37 years after Ulf Sterner of Sweden became the first player trained in Europe to play in the NHL, nearly 30 percent of the league now comes from Europe. These are skill players by and large, and those skills can be showcased much more effectively with more side-to-side action, the way the game is played on larger ice.

The NHL needs to take a major step forward, even if some critics complain. The physical task of enlarging ice surfaces should present no real obstacle. Altering mind-sets might take longer. But if Bettman is looking for a true legacy, nothing could better provide it than this one major move. He could make hockey more exciting, give the sport new energy and new life, and encourage a new audience to tune in and see what it has to offer. All it would require is asking the Zamboni drivers to do just a little more work each night.