Train Wreck

His closest confidant asked the basketball world to pray for Allen Iverson, as if no one has all these years while seeing this train wreck coming. He acted as if the former 76ers star hadn't needed a significant dose of prayer, luck, and divine intervention until now. And as the rest of us are forced to bear witness to a disintegration, the rapid decline of a career clearly lacking nurturing, the time has arrived for Iverson's inner circle to stand up and be counted, to provide some semblance of tough love - by any means necessary.

Walter Brower's eyes lit up as he recalled the rain-drenched day in 1939 when he and a buddy were the first to arrive at a train wreck in the thick of the Pine Barrens. "The cars were all over the tracks. . . . I expected to find people dead," Brower said as he recalled the Aug. 19 crash of the Blue Comet, a luxury train that had departed from Atlantic City with 47 passengers, headed for Jersey City, N.J. For residents of the isolated area, the accident stirred the most excitement and alarm since the crash there of the Mexican airman Emilio Carranza 11 years before.

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee told the nation's governors yesterday that the Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget law was best understood as "a planned train wreck" and that the odds were 50-50 that the accident would occur. The train wreck, in the imagery used by the chairman, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R., N.M.), would come in the form of the deep and automatic budget cuts that would be triggered this fall should Congress fail to reduce the budget deficit to the level stipulated by Gramm-Rudman.

Lennox Lewis wants to fight Mike Tyson, and calls him a "train wreck ready to happen. " After Tyson stopped Lou Savarese in 38 seconds in Glasgow, Scotland, the former heavyweight champion said of Lewis: "I want your heart. I want to eat your children. " Tyson added that when he does fight Lewis, "I will rip out his heart and feed it to him. " Lewis dismissed Tyson's taunts and said he's ready to give up his IBF belt to fight him. "He's a train wreck ready to happen," Lewis said in British newspapers yesterday.

Three weeks before the first big deadline for Pennsylvania's welfare-reform law, thousands of recipients haven't fulfilled their responsibility to search for work. One diagnosis: Many recipients are in "denial. " Then again, so are welfare officials. Officials have yet to acknowledge serious problems in the way many caseworkers have administered the new law. This is easy since they conveniently control what little data there is. And they have yet to comprehend the unfairness of punishing children for their parents' failure to comply with the rules - especially if there's a chance that they are not "willfully" disregarding the law, as required before sanctions.

President Bush yesterday strongly defended his decision to restrict prime rebuilding contracts in Iraq to countries that supported the war, even as his aides acknowledged that the Pentagon's announcement of the new policy was badly mishandled this week. The announcement, which angered some U.S. allies, came just as Bush prepared to launch a global campaign to get countries to forgive much of Iraq's foreign debt, a key to the country's long-term reconstruction. The contract decision could undermine that campaign, as well as recent White House moves to repair ties with countries in Europe and elsewhere that have been splintered by differences over the Iraq war. "It was a train wreck," a top State Department official said of the decision-making process.

Among the worst railroad accidents to occur in this region was the head-on collision of two passenger trains near Bryn Athyn in 1921. Twenty-seven people were killed, most apparently burned to death, and 70 people were injured. As a result of the crash, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission mandated that all railway cars be built of steel. In a recent interview, railroad historian Larry Eastwood Jr. of Huntington Valley said the wreck took place on Dec. 5. By Dec. 23, the commission had published its report on the accident, he said.

On Jan. 4, 1987, Roger A. Horn walked his daughter, Ceres, to a depot platform in Baltimore and stood watching as she boarded an Amtrak passenger train bound north for Philadelphia and Boston. One week after her 16th birthday, Ceres Horn had entered Princeton University, a brilliant young honors student following in the footsteps of her father, a professor of mathematical sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Having been home for Christmas vacation, she was now heading back north to take her midterm exams.

Eighteen people required hospital treatment after a three-train wreck in Suburban Station this morning. After the collision, service on all six SEPTA lines, which normally feeds through four tracks in the center city terminal, fell behind schedule as trains were forced to use the three remaining tracks, a SEPTA spokesman said. Victims of the train wreck were taken to three area hospitals. None of the injuries was believed to be critical, according to a SEPTA spokesman.

When in Rome, do as the Rom-coms do? If only. An inert comedy starring Kristen Bell as a workaholic unlucky in love, When in Rome is a rom-bomb. When lovelorn Beth (Bell), scoops up a handful of coins from Rome's "fountain of love" (not the Trevi, but Trevi-like), she doesn't know she's messing with magic. The men who tossed coins in the pool wishing for love each fall for her, complicating her overscheduled life. Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum whose work looks more like party-planning, gets jilted by her longtime beau on what seems to be the same night she learns that her baby sister (Alexis Dziena)

THE EAGLES will be the first to acknowledge that they've made their share of draft mistakes over the years. But they hardly are alone in that respect. Many consider Bill Belichick to be one of the smartest men ever to set foot in the National Football League. He's taken the Patriots to five Super Bowls and won three of them. His team has recorded nine straight double-digit win seasons and has made it to the postseason 8 of those 9 years. Yet, if you inspect the Patriots' drafts from 2007 through 2009, you might wonder whether Belichick brought in a fourth-grader to make the team's picks during that period.

SEATTLE - There have been precious few positives for the Eagles' defense this season. They entered last night's game against Seattle ranked 21st in the league in points allowed, 15th in yards allowed, a pitiful 32nd in red-zone defense, and have squandered a disgraceful five fourth-quarter leads. The one area they had shown improvement in during this train wreck of a season was their run defense. After allowing 140.2 rushing yards per game and 5.0 yards per carry in their first five games, they had held their last six opponents to 85.3 and 3.6. Going up against a quarterback - Tarvaris Jackson - who was playing with a partially torn pectoral muscle in his chest, and who had managed to complete just 55 percent of his passes and throw seven interceptions in the previous five games, the Eagles knew that if they could contain Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, they likely would lug home their fifth victory on the cross-country flight back to Philadelphia.

AS THE EAGLES reconvene for the NovaCare portion of training camp today, here are some pressing issues that need to be resolved, in no particular order: *  Linebacking: Plenty has been said and written already about the first-team linebackers' struggles in Pittsburgh on Thursday night. A confused, porous half of work against a really poised, honed Steelers offense does not necessarily portend disaster. But it's always troubling when something you suspected might be a weakness really seems to be shaking out that way, in spades.

Walter Brower's eyes lit up as he recalled the rain-drenched day in 1939 when he and a buddy were the first to arrive at a train wreck in the thick of the Pine Barrens. "The cars were all over the tracks. . . . I expected to find people dead," Brower said as he recalled the Aug. 19 crash of the Blue Comet, a luxury train that had departed from Atlantic City with 47 passengers, headed for Jersey City, N.J. For residents of the isolated area, the accident stirred the most excitement and alarm since the crash there of the Mexican airman Emilio Carranza 11 years before.

BETHLEHEM - Maybe this preseason opener is going to look like a train wreck. Good luck getting Juan Castillo to acknowledge that. The Eagles host the Baltimore Ravens tomorrow night at the Linc, 2 weeks and a day after players started checking into Lehigh, still scrambling from the abrupt end to the lockout, without the benefit of the usual spring work that sets up the offensive and defensive schemes. Free agents, usually signed in March, were gathered during the system-installation process and finally got to practice with their teammates last Friday.

BEIJING - A toddler was found alive Sunday in the wreckage of two bullet trains that had crashed in eastern China the day before, an accident that intensified concerns about the country's high-speed rail system. The official New China News Agency said firefighters had found a boy unconscious in the wreckage Sunday afternoon and taken him to a hospital. Three senior railway officials were fired in response to the crash, which killed at least 43 people and injured more than 200 in Wenzhou, in Zhejiang province.

Mary Johnson Ambler, a Quaker widow who rushed to the scene of a train wreck that killed 59 people 155 years ago and was credited with saving countless lives, is being honored Sunday in the Montgomery County borough that bears her name. The event at 24 W. Butler Pike also is being held to dedicate the newly refurbished Ambler station on the Lansdale/Doylestown Regional Rail Line. It will be the first time a plaque has been erected to link the borough's name with its namesake. "It is a very interesting story, and I'll admit, I didn't know anything about her until this event came up," Andrew Busch, press officer for SEPTA, said in an e-mail.

Mel Gibson has a line in The Beaver - well, more accurately, the titular hand puppet he gives voice to in a barmy Cockney accent has the line. It goes: "People seem to love a train wreck when it's not happening to them. " The irony of that observation is not lost on Jodie Foster , who cast her old friend in the dark comedy she directed and costars in, and who witnessed Gibson in the middle of a media maelstrom - his train wreck of a relationship with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva . The actor shared his troubles with Foster during production, and the infamous Gibson-Grigorieva telephone recordings became public as Foster was directing reshoots.

James Mongan, 69, a physician and health-care-policy expert who helped develop President Jimmy Carter's doomed national health plan and who was one of the architects of Massachusetts' landmark health-care law, has died. The San Francisco native was Carter's deputy assistant secretary of health. He developed a health plan that failed amid disagreements among Democrats. He later served as president of New England's largest hospital chain, Partners HealthCare System Inc. He was president of Massachusetts General Hospital and dean of the Missouri School of Medicine.

The 76ers haven't lost three games in a row since November, when they dropped five straight during that train wreck of a 3-13 start. But they'll face a challenge to avoid three straight defeats after Sunday's 114-111 overtime loss to the Sacramento Kings in a matinee mishap at the Wells Fargo Center. After losing in Miami on Friday, the Sixers must win Monday in Chicago against the Eastern Conference-leading Bulls to avoid a three-game skid. The last time the Sixers visited the United Center, they lost by 45. The Sixers (37-36)