THE SIDELINES : Player Slammed for Nazi Remark

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Israel’s embassy in New Zealand condemned Israeli tennis player Amos Mansdorf today for saying he would have played in Nazi Germany had he lived then.

“For a Jewish person to say something like this about Nazi Germany, it is disgusting,” First Secretary Zeev Luria said.

Mansdorf made his comment in Auckland in an angry denunciation of demonstrators who disrupted his first-round match at the New Zealand Open on Monday. The protesters targeted Mansdorf because he is on a United Nations blacklist for playing in South Africa.

Mansdorf said politics should be kept out of sports, citing Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter who devastated the Nazis by taking four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.