July 19, 1996

Greed causes games to fall from grace

By STEVE SIMMONS
Toronto Sun ATLANTA -- The great and many Olympic contradictions are on display almost everywhere you look in this mess of a city grimacing to put on a happy face.
The Games of the 26th Olympiad will open tonight with grand celebrations and a most confusing and disturbing backdrop: that of America, loud and corporate, crass and commercial, wealthy, arrogant and intolerant.
The face of these Games sadly belongs to Shaquille O'Neal, the giant of a basketball player, who yesterday used the Olympic forum and his sponsorship agreement with Reebok to flaunt the hideous new contract - $120 million for seven years - he has signed with the Los Angeles Lakers.
None of this, of course, has anything to do with the Olympic Games we once knew and believed in. But everything has a price and this oldest of sports events has been mortgaged to the highest bidder, and never with as little dignity as will be witnessed in what some people are calling Ad-lanta.
The Olympic Games are supposed to be about competition, about athletes, about bringing nations together, about sport and accomplishment, not about a Dream Team comprised of NBA gazillionaires who flaunt and taunt their Only-In-America ways and have managed to distract from the real Olympians here.
There will still be, within the parameters of the new Olympic Games, the kind of performances, the kind of moments, the kind of magic that will mesmerize us. Even Shaquille O'Neal, big feet and all, cannot trample on all of that. But the moments will be fewer and the magic will be less enticing.
And that is so unfortunate.
We will watch the next two weeks, so many of us glued to our television screens, so many of us compelled by the stories of athletes we know and so many we will come to know as ours. We will watch Donovan Bailey in his first Olympics and Charmaine Crooks in likely her last. We, as Canadians, will watch our own and also the best of the rest of the world. We are not so provincial in our taste for Olympic bests.
But the Americans care little about the rest of the world. These are their Games. These aren't the Olympics. These are America's Games. This is their money spent. The language here is English. If you don't speak it, too bad. If you don't understand it, too bad.
As Karl Malone, another Dream Teamer said yesterday: "This is how we do things over here in America, son.''
It is how the Dream Teamers do things. They live in plush hotels here, ride in limousines, are guarded with tight security. They are in no way interested in getting to meet and know other athletes, not interested in the Olympic experience, interested only in fostering their own images, their own sponsors and in kicking ass.
"It's tough for us,'' Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls said in complete sincerity. "It's tough for us to enjoy ourselves. It's tough for us to even walk around here.''
We should all have it so tough.
Antonio Tarver is a 28-year-old boxer from an Orlando ghetto who knows Shaq O'Neal only from what he has seen from his television screen. But Tarver is hoping to leave the Olympics with the same color of medal - gold.
Antonio Tarver also is dead broke. So is his family. No $100-million deal awaits him. Not even employment after the Games.
"I guess we're the last of the real amateurs,'' Tarver said yesterday. "I guess we're the only real Olympians left.''
Tarver and so many athletes here are not offended simply by the presence of the Dream Team, but truly hurt by the juxtaposition of rich and poor competing for the same athletic prizes and the same headlines.
"It's really unfair,'' the boxer said, knowing this is his time, his stage and he is being shoved off it. "We all come from poor families. We've struggled just to get here, to make the Olympic team. But look on the streets. People selling Olympic T-shirts and who's on them but Shaq. Look at what's on TV, in the papers. It's not us. And to be shut out, to see the TV time going to them - that really hurts.''
This is Tarver's time and he is being sold out by the process.
"There are people not getting rich from their sports," Tarver said. "And I resent people saying, `You're going to the Olympics, how much are you going to make?' I resent what the Dream Team brings to the Olympics and I resent all the attention they take from so many other deserving athletes.''
And tonight, inside the brand new Olympic Stadium where the greatest athletes in the world will parade, the messages will be mixed and pictures skewed.
This is American sport in 1996, headed in the wrong direction. The Olympics should be about dreams, not Dream Teams.