TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / 072792 / 07279936.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-03-25 | 7.1 KB | 152 lines

<text id=92TT1686> <title> July 27, 1992: Traditions:Pro Vs. Amateur </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 July 27, 1992 The Democrats' New Generation </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> OLYMPICS, Page 64 1992 SUMMER GAMES TRADITIONS: Pro vs. Amateur </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>