The Whole World Was Watching

      Now that they’re over, I’m sensing that a lot of you have come around on the Olympics.

      There was a time when all I’d hear was: “too jingoistic,” “too commercial,” “made for TV.”

      I never bought that. I have not been to the World Series, the Super Bowl, the World Cup or any other of those high-priced, one-sport finals. But I did manage to obtain tickets to four Olympics: Montreal, Barcelona, Atlanta and Beijing. The first with friends, the rest with family, always with my wife, who is not otherwise a sports fan.

      I had the pleasure of bringing my mother and mother-in-law once each, my father-in-law twice. Our kids accompanied us three times.

      It invariably took a lot of finagling to secure the tickets. As I recall, I located tickets to Atlanta in Canada. Always the cheap seats. The most inexpensive flights. Places to stay often way out of town.

      And, after mistakenly stumbling into rhythm gymnastics in Barcelona, I learned to stick mostly to track and field, at night, in the big stadium: the three-ring circus, the human bests—fastest, strongest, highest, furthest and more fastest.

      We were in the stadium when Caitlyn Jenner, still stuck in Bruce Jenner’s body, did her Wheaties-box pose. We were there for lots of Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt.

      And I loved, each time, the fact that much of humankind was watching and enjoying this one spectacle, together. I was thrilled by the thought that we were within yelling distance of an all-too-rare global cynosure.

      And—anti-anti-anti-cynic that I am (in other words I try not to be too cynical all the time)—I gloried in the mix of countries and races in the races…and also, most definitely, in the stands. On a couple of occasion my kids climbed up or down a few rows to join a dancing, chanting group from somewhere in Africa as they cheered their woman or man on.

      But, yeah, this ain’t your neighborhood softball game. There’s lots of money being spent and made, most of it by big corporations. The top athletes from the big countries themselves qualify as business entities. And maybe sometimes, particularly back in the Cold-War days, and maybe again now, it does feel a bit like war by other means. I noted the absence of a Russian team in Paris this summer.

      But nonviolent means are the best means for battles between nations. And the comradery you see after a competition in almost all of the athletes of various nationalities was almost always present in the stands: sharing the other fan’s triumphs, empathizing with the other fan’s defeats. Go Kenya!

      So, now I’m kicking myself.

      We should have been in Paris. I gave into that it’s-so-much-easier-to-just-watch-on-TV thing. On television it’s just another television show. In person it feels as if you’ve arrived at the center world.        

      I’m already trying to figure out how to finagle LA. The tickets will be impossible. The traffic is really, really gonna suck, and, apparently, they don’t have railroads that go anywhere anyone wants to go in Southern California. The only available hotel may be in Tijuana.

      See you there?