It was roughly 43 years ago that Xia Boyu made his first attempt to scale Mount Everest. The Chinese climber had been in his mid-20s, serving in an expedition that came close to the peak before it unraveled under the force of high-altitude storms.

Xia lost his feet to frostbite during that ill-fated effort. Two decades later, he would also lose both legs beneath the knee to lymphoma. But all the while, the double amputee held onto his dream of returning to — and conquering — Everest.

And on Monday, Xia finally achieved that dream. Xia, his fellow team members and the Sherpas supporting them summited the mountain early in the morning, according to Imagine Trek and Expedition, the group leading the effort.

He is at least the second double amputee climber to summit Everest, after New Zealand’s Mark Inglis achieved that feat in 2006.

But at the start of the year, it appeared the moment would never come for Xia. Shortly before the New Year, Nepal’s government sought to ban double amputees, along with solo and blind climbers, from scaling all of the mountains within its borders unless they could obtain a doctor’s written permission.

As NPR’s Lauren Frayer reported at the time, the new regulations were intended “to keep people safe and also to create jobs for local guides and Sherpas” — but those rules were tossed just months later by Nepal’s high court for discriminating against people with disabilities.

After the ruling, Xia wasted no time arranging another attempt — his fourth in about five years, according to Agence-France Presse. The news agency reports that canceled climbing seasons stymied his plans in 2014 and 2015, and that he came within 200 meters of the summit in 2016, before “bad weather forced him to turn back.”

In the meantime, avalanches and deadly accidents made for a steady stream of grim news from the mountain.

Still, shortly before heading back to Everest base camp last month for a fifth try, he told AFP that nothing had changed for him.

“Climbing Mount Everest is my dream. I have to realise it,” he said. “It also represents a personal challenge, a challenge of fate.”

Now, obstinate fate finally relented before that determination.

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Many consider the running back Jim Brown the greatest American football player ever. But he’s known as much more than an athlete — he’s an activist, an actor, a thinker and a man with an alleged history of violence against women.

Here’s how he’s described in the opening paragraph of Dave Zirin’s new biography, Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.

Football is the closest thing we have in this country to a national religion, albeit a religion built on a foundation of crippled apostles and disposable martyrs. In this brutal church, Jim Brown is the closest thing to a warrior Saint.

Zirin, sports correspondent for The Nation, spoke to NPR about this complicated figure, who is now 82 years old.

“I think it’s important that when we look at these icons of the past, that we look at them not as these kinds of immortals,” Zirin says. “Because if we do that, when we deify people, the problem with that is then there’s nothing to learn from them or their lives. It’s a story of somebody who is very flawed, but somebody who also did heroic things. As Howard Bryant, the great sportswriter, said, he said: Jim Brown is heroic, but he’s no hero. And I think that’s the best way to look at his life.”

Interview Highlights

On why he chose Jim Brown as a subject, and why now

There’s a discussion happening right now — not just in the world of sports, but I think nationally — about masculinity, and about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a real man. And I think we are assessing some of what we’ve been taught. And I think Jim Brown, for the last 50 years, has been this kind of icon of the old way of looking at manhood: somebody who defined his manhood by not showing a great deal of emotion; by playing in the National Football League and never missing a game for injury, and being lauded for that; as being somebody who stepped inside the black power movement and was an icon; as someone who stepped into Hollywood, and was thought that he could be the black John Wayne and participated in the blaxploitation era, which was a very hyper-masculinized form of cinema at the time; and as somebody who stepped to the terrain of the gang battles in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and did a tremendous amount of activism to try to bring warring gangs together and bring peace to the streets of South Central Los Angeles. And all of these landscapes he did with this resolute focus on teaching people of what it means to be a “real man.” And one of the things I try to argue in the book, and this connects with the discussions which are happening right now about masculinity, is whether or not that discussion of manhood is positive or negative. And so I also look in the book about Jim Brown’s history with women, which is the dark side, if you will, of this discussion about masculinity — particularly the issue of violence against women.

On where Jim Brown grew up, and how it influenced his particular type of activism

Well, it’s a fascinating story, because Jim Brown was raised by women on St. Simons Island, which is off the coast of Georgia. And St. Simons was a place that was built on self-sufficiency because the ground was so rough that when enslaved people were brought from Africa, their communities were largely left alone. And this, I think, made a mark on Jim Brown throughout his younger years, of this idea of not being an integrationist, not being someone who supported the goals of Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.], of being someone who more was on the side of: How do we, as black Americans, build our own institutions of power and self-sufficiency? …

And this is something I think we forget historically, is that there was a black freedom struggle in this country, but there was a left wing and right wing to that freedom struggle. It’s not like everybody believed in marching, or everybody believed in the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins. There was a wide variety of thinking about how black liberation could be achieved. And Jim Brown was, you could argue, on the conservative wing of that camp. And I think it connects to why Jim Brown today is a supporter of Donald Trump … and why he supported Richard Nixon in 1968, as did other figures of that era like the singer James Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. Like, there was black support for Richard Nixon in 1968, and it was built around this idea of economic self-sufficiency.

On Jim Brown’s stance about Colin Kaepernick and modern sports protests

It’s fascinating to me, because Jim Brown said just the other week, on the NFL Network, that if he was the general manager of a team, he would not sign Colin Kaepernick. Last year he walked into the locker room of the Cleveland Browns — the team that of course made Jim Brown famous — and he told players who had been kneeling that they needed to cut it out. And so Jim Brown is really acting as an agent of [NFL] ownership in these cases. …

See, this is what I’m trying to argue with this book, because a lot of people in the sports world were shocked when he said these things, saying: How could Jim Brown, this icon of the black freedom struggle, how could he possibly bury Colin Kaepernick in this way? How can he possibly go into the locker room and tell players to stand up and shut up during the national anthem? And part of what I’m arguing is that: No, these have always been his politics. He’s always had this strain of conservatism in his politics that black people do not achieve advancement through the politics of protest, but through the politics of earning as much money as possible, and trying to get out of the capitalist system whatever they can for the purposes of building economic self-sufficiency. And protest is an impediment to that in the mind of Jim Brown. And those have always been his politics.

What I find so interesting is that his stature on the field, I think, blinded people to what his politics were. I’ll tell you an example of this that I find so interesting, is I scoured the black press in 1968 for when Jim Brown endorsed Richard Nixon, and there are scathing editorials against other black celebrities who were endorsing Nixon, and you could not find a bad word about Jim Brown.

On the history of accusations against Jim Brown of violence against women

It’s a series of accusations that go from the 1960s through the 1990s, and without a conviction. … The repeated accusations and descriptions lead you to look at this as a situation where Jim Brown, at times in his life, definitely saw women as part of the problem, as something that would bring down the black family if they asserted themselves too much in the context of his life. And the accusations against Jim Brown are horrific, and they should be viewed as horrific. But it’s important to say that when they took place, that’s not how they were viewed — they were viewed with a nudge and a wink. And so part of what I’m writing this book is getting us to reassess those times and say: The time of nudging and winking and violence against women has to end — it has to go into the graveyard of history.

Sarah Handel and Viet Le produced and edited this story for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.

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Under pressure to change its policies or lose the right to host golf at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, an exclusive golf club has now accepted three women as full members, breaking with decades of gender discrimination.

Founded in 1929, the private Kasumigaseki Country Club was picked to host the men’s and women’s Olympic tournaments. But the International Olympic Committee reiterated last year that if the club wanted to host the Olympics, it would have to change.

Women have been allowed to play the club’s two 18-hole courses – but never on Sunday, and not as full members. The club voted to change its membership rules last year.

The golf club is in Saitama prefecture, northwest of downtown Tokyo. Its membership policies were put in the spotlight in January of 2017, when Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said, “I feel very uncomfortable about women not being able to become a regular member in this era.”

Shaded by large pine trees, the lush course is dotted with dogwoods and hydrangeas. It’s where President Trump played with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe when he visited Japan in November. And it’s been gearing up for the Olympics, including a course redesign by Tom and Logan Fazio in 2016.

The club’s general manager, Hiroshi Imaizumi, says it previously had two female full members – but that was around four decades ago, reports The Japan Times. Ending the ban, he said, “is the trend of the time.”

“It always understood it would have to be gender equal,” IOC Vice President John Coates said of Kasumigaseki in early 2017. But Coates also said time was running out for the club’s members to adapt.

Despite the public pressure, the Tokyo-area club has largely avoided the outcry that hit Scotland’s historic Muirfield golf club – which was tossed from the British Open’s rotation of venues in 2016, after its members voted to preserve its 270-year-old ban on women becoming members. The club lifted the ban in 2017, after a second vote.

Like many prestigious courses, Kasumigaseki has a strict dress code. For much of the year, a blazer or jacket must be worn at the time of arrival, for instance. There are also standards for covering the legs.

“Miniskirts, hot pants, tights, and leggings are not allowed for women,” the club’s rules state. “Golf skirts and culottes should be no shorter than 5 centimeters above the knee.”

Both men and women can wear shorts – provided they end above the knee and are not too short. Only women can wear sleeveless shirts. Anyone who pops their shirt collar up out on the course must know that “the collar should be turned down in the clubhouse,” the rules state.

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