This year I’ve found myself hooked on at least a couple of Olympic sports I would hardly otherwise spend any time on.
I’ve always loved track and field, and may even have some medals and ribbons from high school saved and packed away somewhere. If I can hardly walk today, and my balance is suspect, once upon a time I could actually run pretty fast and jump pretty far and high.
The Olympics, of course, represent the epitome of track and field accomplishment. My first recollection would have likely been of Bob Mathias, Olympic decathlon champion in 1948. I was only starting first grade, but by the time I was in the fourth grade Mathias would, before becoming a California congressman, win another Olympic gold medal in the sport.
And even though my knowledge these days of the glitzy Kardashians is, at best, second-hand, I can still see the family’s patriarch of late, Bruce Jenner, waving an American flag as he took a victory lap in the 1976 Montreal Olympics following his decathlon victory. As if his post-Olympic life hasn’t seemingly been reduced, like much of America, to glamour over substance.
The necessity of America’s Olympians becoming professional athletes in order to compete on a comparable playing field with the rest of the world has, from my point of view, taken some of the luster off Olympic achievement. Yet another reminder of commercialism compromising the value of so much that is worth doing for its own sake.
Nowhere is this truer, at least in the Olympics, than on the basketball court. The upside being, at least, no more “amateur” hypocricy as that which cost the legendary Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest American athlete ever, his Olympic medals from Stockholm in 1912.
Those are the two Olympic sports I know and care about most–track and field and basketball. For as exciting as volleyball is–like most people–I’ve only enjoyed it more recreationally than competitively. The same for ping-pong or badmitton, tennis or cycling–and in my case, even swimming.
As for boxing, even in the Olympics, those suspicious of the “women’s movement” would point to the distaff participation in the sport these days as an example of when the advancing of that particular social agenda can, unfortunately, exact too high a price.
With all the uproar these days regarding America’s supposed “exceptionalism”–this seems to have been surely the case, at least athletically, in these 2012 Olympics.
So how did I get hooked this time on women’s soccer and beach volleyball? I typically know and care as much about either as I enjoy the “art” of Jackson Pollock or the “music” of Philip Glass.
Soccer is, of course, the rest of the world’s football. And I actually watched, swept up in the drama, as the American women defeated Canada, and then Japan for a gold medal. ‘Though the Canadians claim their loss was due to an official’s controversial call.
America’s women’s soccer team, in this Olympics, was hardly short on pulchritude, with such celebrity glamour in the likes of Hope Solo, Abby Wambach or Alex Morgan. Was that what piqued my interest? Or was it their athletic skill and tenacity at a game, the strategy, even the rules involved being something I know nothing about?
Maybe it was the charm and enthusiasm of NBC television’s announcer, the guy with the colorful British accent? Or then, again, just some more of my Yankee jingoism?
As for women’s beach volleyball–in particular, two American women with no cleavage wearing bikinis–why would I be watching them? Was it because they seemed, otherwise, so wholesome? These two wives and mothers outlasting notably younger women in a game, the intensity of which is compelling? Was it their enduring friendship, going back to high school, a shared history which seems to have forged their devotion to one another? At least in a world that seems, these days, to value so little such loyalty?
As for another Olympic sport so far removed from my experience, one actually showed up next door to where I lived as a youngster. It was 1952, and Bob Detweiler won a gold medal as a member of the Naval Academy’s “Great Eight” crew in the sport of rowing.
No one where I came from, a small coal mining town in southern Illinois, would have understood what that accomplishment represented. But when Bob followed his older brothers to Annapolis–he and some other burly midwestern football players were turned into oarsmen.
Bob was 13 years older than I, a giant of a man, but when he was home in the summers, I became his shadow. From where my family lived, you could throw a rock and hit the Detweiler’s house. If I wanted a “big brother,” Bob also seemed to delight in having me as the “little brother” he’d never had. He let me tag along with him almost everywhere, from helping him do chores for his mother (like canning peaches; my little hands could reach the bottom of those Mason jars), to teaching me how to swim and taking me camping.
Bob Detweiler also had a bit of Tom Sawyer in him and wasn’t above assigning me tasks which I would have died trying, the likes of which he got such a kick out of supervising. Like “timing” me, seeing how many times and how fast I could run up and down the stairs of the Detweiler’s two-story-with-a-basement house. As it were, a third-grader training for the Olympics.
Or when he dared me, offering to buy me as much ice cream as I could eat at Mr. Green’s drugstore. And, of course, I nearly made myself sick on such a “treat.” There wasn’t much about Bob Detweiler–much less, I would later realize, what wasn’t already forming in me–that wasn’t “competitive.” His influence may have had something to do with that.
Fortunately, however, what may have seemed “sadistic” was so over-ridden by the “affection” I felt from Bob, an emotionally safe, yet challenging sense of how he “prized” me in a way meant to be more of a “blessing” than a “burden.” Indeed, a “mentoring” that was “balanced” in both discipline and nurture.
And it never stopped. Until he died several years ago. A pilot, a retired Air Force officer, an accomplished classical pianist, with a master’s degree in physics, not to mention, an Eagle Scout, Colonel Detweiler continued to touch my life across the years of his distinguished military career; and later, as a private industry physicist and active Mormon churchman living in Utah. He would write me inspiring letters from where, around the world, he was stationed, and make an effort to visit me from time to time, to experience in more of a peer relationship, how I was developing.
Bob Detweiler’s world was much bigger than mine has ever been. If the Olympics are meant to promote international relations, in Bob’s case, it couldn’t have been more literal. His first wife, the mother of his oldest three children, was, in fact, a Finnish woman he met in Helsinki while at the Olympics in 1952.
Apparently, in the sport of crew there is a tradition where the competitors “swap jerseys” following a race. So when I was a little kid, and Bob would be home from the Naval Academy for a few weeks in the summertime, following his midshipman cruise, I was in awe of the array of different “crew shirts” he would wear, representing different colleges, mostly from the Ivy League–Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Penn, and the like–schools that he and his Navy team mates had raced against.
Also, apparently, there is no more physically demanding sport than that of crew. As they say, “you’ve left it all on the course” when the race is over. Bob Detweiler thrived on such a challenge. Just as, with eight different rowers–captained by a cockswain–propelling a scull across the water, there is also likely no sport more demanding when it comes to teamwork, the efficient coordinating of so many different individuals working together as one.
In 1992, I visited Annapolis, Maryland, to meet with Bob Detweiler and his crew mates. The cockswain from that illustrious crew had died and had been cremated. The next day–at the request of the man’s widow–the living members of the crew (most of them retired military officers) were to row out on Chesapeake Bay and scatter the cockswain’s ashes on the water of their old “home” race course.
It was a touching moment, indeed, as I stood in the boathouse of the Naval Academy. I was standing beneath a 1952 picture of those college-age athletes while visiting with those same gentlemen, now forty years later.
As midshipmen, in their three years of varsity competition in the sport of crew (eight-oar rowing), the Naval Academy’s “Great Eight”–they never lost a race, including their gold medal victory in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
