Sport: Things Were Very, Very Bad

By the flight of a silvery balloon, man not only was transported but moved again last week. Double Eagle V, which lifted off and blew away from Japan on Tuesday, came down nearly four days later in a rainstorm near the little mountain town of Covelo, Calif. The four adventurers in the gondola—Ben Abruzzo, 51, Larry Newman, 34, Ron Clark, 41 (all of Albuquerque), and Rocky Aoki, 43, Japanese-born owner of the Benihana restaurant chain—drank champagne toasts to the first balloon to make it across the Pacific Ocean and then settled down to wait overnight for rescue.

Three years ago, Captain Abruzzo...