Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/072792/07279936.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 7KB | 148 lines

                                                                                OLYMPICS, Page 64

1992 SUMMER GAMES

TRADITIONS: Pro vs. Amateur


With the arrival of the U.S. basketball millionaires, the Games
have turned a final corner. Shamateurism is gone. But will glitz
and hype now prevail?

By DANIEL BENJAMIN


    Call them the In-Your-Face Games. That is what they will
feel like to the Angolans, Venezuelans or whoever else has the
misfortune to be standing on the Olympic basketball court as
Michael Jordan spins, slides and flies by on his way to the
hoop. The show put on by the U.S. team will be spectacular but
one-sided. But that's what happens when one team can assemble
the finest basketball talent ever to strut the Olympic
floorboards.

    Players who face the Americans will not be the only ones
experiencing a revelation: fans will too. The old-style Games,
in which a collection of the mostly unheralded and unpaid would
suddenly achieve the glory of champions, are utterly gone. Sure,
the unsung heroes of team handball will still have their moment
on the podium. And a modestly compensated athlete with little
chance of a medal, such as U.S. table-tennis player Sean
O'Neill, will nonetheless bask in the chance to compete.

    But more than ever before, the Olympic scene will include
pampered stars: Carl Lewis, Steffi Graf, a U.S. basketball team
that collectively earns about $33 million a year -- the budget
of a good-size town. The pertinent word here is amateurism, and
the official condition is deceased. There were steps in this
direction in 1984 and 1988, but now the modern Olympics are wide
open.

    Good or bad? Will the Olympic slogan of "Faster, higher,
stronger" metamorphose into "Dollars, hype, celebrity"? Will the
remaining truly amateur events, such as archery and Greco-Roman
wrestling, be marginalized even more? The challenge for the
Olympic movement will be to strike a balance between the
inevitable marketing excesses and that evanescent thing, the
Olympic spirit.

    The first beneficiary of flinging open the gates is the
historical truth: amateurism has long been portrayed as part of
the heritage of the ancient Greek Games. The tie with the past,
though, was completely spurious. The Greeks had no concept of
amateurism. For them, an Olympic competitor was a city's
champion, who was supported while he trained and then was richly
rewarded for his victory.

    Amateurism's provenance was much, much later, in Victorian
England. A devoted Anglophile, Baron Pierre de Coubertin,
stipulated that the modern Games he conjured into existence in
1896 should be amateur, in part because he believed that would
guarantee gentlemanly fair play. Bound up as well in the ideal
was a desire to maintain the barriers of class. The leisured
rich did not want to compete with working-class athletes whose
muscles were toned by manual labor.

    Unfortunately, the creed of amateurism ill fit a world in
which competition was being democratized, the popularity of
sport was burgeoning, and standards of competition were rising.
Nonetheless, the rules were followed strictly, even
vindictively, and never more so than in the case of Jim Thorpe,
U.S. winner of both the decathlon and the now discontinued
pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics. The following year, it was
discovered that Thorpe had received $25 a week to play baseball
during the summers of 1909 and '10 -- a common practice for
college athletes, many of whom used aliases. Thorpe was stripped
of his awards. Seventy years later -- 30 after Thorpe's death
-- the injustice was rectified.

    Despite the strictures, it was not until the cold war that
amateurism became hotly debated, largely because of the biggest
circumvention of the code. Soviet bloc nations, aiming to
demonstrate communism's superiority, poured resources into
state-run training programs and put athletes on state payrolls,
calling them teachers, soldiers or commissars while paying them
to play full time.

    Meanwhile, a different form of shamateurism was blossoming
in the West. To support themselves, athletes began to accept
under-the-table appearance money at meets, as well as bribes
from sportswear manufacturers. Colleges and universities awarded
athletic scholarships that were euphemistically called
grants-in-training but that technically made their recipients
into professionals.

    The creed resisted reform for as long as it did largely
because of Avery Brundage, president of the International
Olympic Committee from 1952 to '72. An American self-made
millionaire and Olympian -- he had placed sixth in the 1912
pentathlon behind Thorpe -- Brundage had convictions that were
nothing short of religious. "The Olympic movement today," he
thundered, "is a revolt against 20th century materialism -- a
devotion to the cause and not the reward."

    Yet the walls Brundage built were not strong enough to
withstand the inevitable in a world where sport has become a
preeminent form of entertainment. Amid raging debate, in 1981
the word amateur was stricken from the Olympic charter. Unable
to kill the sacred calf itself, the I.O.C. turned over
eligibility rules to the individual sports federations in 1987,
and the transitions that followed were haphazard and often
unfair.

    The most dubious innovation was trust-fund athletics.
Competitors could receive appearance money and endorsement
contracts, but the money had to be deposited in trust funds. It
amounted to money laundering for athletes. Funds for expenses
could be withdrawn, and the whole could be cashed out upon
retirement. Accountants could not even call this deferred
income, but it was the fig leaf needed for eligibility.

    In the past few years, the movement toward professionalism
has only accelerated. "We're not in this sport because we like
it or we want to earn our way through school," Leroy Burrell,
a top American sprinter, told the Wall Street Journal in 1990.
"We're in it to make money." The lack of hypocrisy may be
refreshing, but the bald-faced commercial sentiment may start
grating before long.

    Many sports fans instinctively feel that athletics, like
art, is an area of life where money should not be paramount;
the thing itself, the game, should be. But isn't there a middle
ground somewhere between amateurism and full-court-press
plutocracy? The demand by the I.O.C. that no one earn money
strictly for an appearance in the Games is one indication of the
enduring strength of the Olympic ideal. The fact that one
non-N.B.A. basketball player, Christian Laettner, has been
included on the American squad seems to be yet another bow to
the notion of sport for its own sake. The gesture bespeaks an
ambivalence -- one that will not soon vanish from the Games.