A Laugh for the Olympics

by ALLEN JACKSON

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DURING the past year many newspapers and magazines in this country have felt, obliged to print at least one article on the possibility of the Russians’ winning the Olympic games. All of them have dwelt on the same themes, have used the same examples, and have expressed the same general point of view. Some of them have been sad, some of them mad. Some have been written by professional sports writers, some by general commentators. But no matter who the author or what his variation on the same theme, every article has contained the same basic flaw: all of them have been entirely lacking in humor.

Sport is now a question of Moral Seriousness. Sport is now commented on by the heads of Church and State, and it is even given some attention by the Makers of Policy. This has been going on for quite a few years. The Americans and the Russians are not the first ones to get sport in such a fix, either. The Greeks did the same. They too made sport a question of Moral Seriousness, and also national pride and national self-righteousness.

It is this business of self-righteousness that calls for humor — and also ensures one’s never getting it. Self-righteous people, like us, like the writers of these un-Olympian Olympic articles, like their counterparts in Russia, are the most humorless of beings. They never laugh at themselves and so they never get the true facts. Take Avery Brundage, for example — the man who for many years has been our anointed supreme judge of sporting ethics and our number one tracer of moral lines, He has made some elementary mistakes. Once he wrote in an article: “There is a touch of irony in this [the Russians’ beating our boys and breaking our records], for sports and games were once almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon.” I know that this is an elementary mistake because I for one have heard of the Ancient Greeks; and they were not AngloSaxons. Where I come from, a Greek is just as unAnglo-Saxon as Jim Thorpe or Jesse Owens or Bronko Nagurski.

Well, sir, when a person can’t see a laugh in the Olympics he is coming pretty close to being unAmerican. I say that because the impression I got from reading my college anthologies was that we Americans are noted for our sense of humor; and the way I learned it, our humor is the sort that always shows up especially strong when the chips are down. So in view of the fact that we have already lost the Winter Olympics to the Russians and that we stand a fine chance of losing again in Melbourne, we shouldn’t blame ourselves too much if we can’t help seeing some laughs in the way us 99 per cent pure products of the American Way of Life talk about them Red Bums.

But if we are going to laugh wisely, we ought to have a fairly clear idea of what we are laughing at. So first let’s have a look at these Russian athletes and see what we are up against.

The Russian athletes are grim. This fact has been repeated many times in the sad and mad articles, so it must be true. By now everyone must have heard about the Russian skier who never uses a ski lift, because, I think he said, in sport as in life you can’t fully appreciate the thrilling ride down unless you have sweated and cussed your way up. This doesn’t seem to be such a wrong idea — especially if you are trying to get in shape for a, big meet, and if you live in a cold poor country where they don’t have too many steam-heated ski lifts.

The Russians’ grimness is something we have to watch out for, however, because we good-natured Yanks are never grim, and it might take us by surprise. We play hard, of course, and it is true that the faces of our athletes are at times so sternly set and fiercely knotted, and so determinedly denuded of any chance smirk, that their expressions might well be considered — by un-Anglo-Saxons who are not familiar with the subtleties of the American Face — grim. But we do not call lliesc expressions grim. What do we call t hem? Is there a difference between the Russian primness and the “American Expression"?

There certainly is: and the key to the difference was furnished last summer by a man in Life magazine who said, “Soviet teams do not play at their sports; they work at them.”And we all know that whenever anyone is working he looks pretty grim. That’s the difference: the Russians work, the Americans play.

But that isn’t the whole story, I’m afraid; because even though the American players plan, they very often do not look as if they are playing. Some of them look as if they are working. This peculiarity was explained by the same magazine that printed the above statement—a few months later, in a photo story about the souls of American football players. A lot of pictures were taken of faces. The photography was very well done, as I was able to judge with a certain amount of authority, for I played on a team that had faces just like the ones in the pictures. I saw that the photographer had accurately caught the collective single mood, the collective single expression. All the faces had it. There wasn’t the slightest twitch or twinkle of humor in any of those faces; but mind you, they were not grim. The editors of Life didn’t say just what kind of expression it was, but they did suggest that it was one that led to victory; and it was therefore an expression that was altogether fitting and proper. Personally, I wish the editors had been more definite. Before we go to Melbourne we ought to have a single word or phrase to describe those of our athletes whose faces seem to express work rather than play. Perhaps we could use “Fitting and Proper.”Or for short, FAP.

The Russians are Spartan and they are grim. These qualities are closely connected with another fact we know about them: the Russians are forced to engage in sport. Now if there is anything that tends to make me fear the Russians, that causes me to wonder if they are indeed a separate breed, it is this fact about their being forced to engage in sport. The Russians, we know, train ten hours a day, every day, rain or shine or Siberian snow. Therefore they must be a new breed; for every coach knows that even the best Anglo-Saxon athletes are very tired after three hours practice, and if they were forced to work any longer than that they would fold up and die; or they would fake a Charley horse and go home to their TV sets. But I can’t really believe that the Russians are a new breed. Instead I rather incline to the notion that our intelligence agents who tell us these things are a chubby and nearsighted bunch of fellows who have never in their lives engaged in strenuous sport; and having no practical experience, they don’t realize that toplevel athletic accomplishment is one of the most unforceable of all human activities, and that if an athlete hasn t got a great and inborn and entirely personal will to win, no commissar will ever be able to order him to have one.

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I DO not wish 1o dwell on the mistakes that our intelligence agents have made; but I know that the abose comments will draw fire, and many people will say, “All right, maybe they don’t practice ten hours a day; but we know for sure that when a Russian athlete loses, he catches holy hell, to say the least.”So I must add a word about this. I have never been in Russia; but I am quile positive that our intelligence agents are misinformed when they report that the Russian State chastises severely any Russian at hlete w ho does not win. The case of Yuri Tukalov, who lost a row ing race at Henley, is now almost as famous among American sportsmen as the case of the skier who never uses a ski lift. All the sad and mad articles have pointed out Yuri Tukalov as a pitiable example of what happens when a Russian athlete loses.

What happened was this: Yuri Tukalov won a gold medal at Helsinki in '52. He was very grim when he won the gold medal. Then, believe it or not, he grew less grim. When Yuri returned to Moscow after the Olympics the MAD observed that he smiled at least once a week. Then, in ‘o4, Yuri lost a race to a grim Yugoslav at Henley. That was when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics started to give him hell. Yuri Tukalov was publicly chastised. In Pravda. He was investigated. Indignities were cast upon him in public places by the MAD. His loyalty was questioned. His friends turned on him and wrote exposes of his un-Russian personal habits — articles that appeared in the Russian counterpart of Confidential magazine.

I do not doubt that, all this happened. I am positive that it did happen. But the point that our intelligence reports emphasized was that this chastisement was ordered by the Russian State, by the Tarty. That part of the story is false. Our agents were misinformed. It is true that the Russian politicians are as fond of wasting breath as American politicians are; but I do not believe that the Russians are such maniacally profligate breath-wasters that they would order their sports writers to do something that the sports writers, and many others, were already eager to do.

The Russian State did not order the chastisement of the defeated Yuri Tukalov. It wasn’t at all necessary to give such an order. The reason it wasn’t necessary is that the Russians are basically very much like us. They are just as fickle as we are. There are people among the Russians w ho spend one half of their time on earth worshiping heroes, and the other half of the time snarling at champions who have stumbled. All of us, except our intelligence agents, know that we have the same kind of people in this country. Some of them are sports writers, some are literary critics; many are leaders of thought, and many are just plain bums. They are all bums, when you come right down to it. A person who gangs up with others and kicks a champion when he is down is always a bum, no matter what language he yaps in, or what sophisticated magazine prints his parodies.

I now come to the wickedest of all the facts that we know about the Russians. It is what Life magazine stated in the title of one of its sad articles: “Red Amateurs Are Pros.” What, indeed, could be wickeder than sending professional athletes to the Olympic games—the Olympic games which, except for the very beginning, when the un-AngloSaxon Greeks often gave big money and big concubines to champions, have always been the most completely amateur of all completely amateur contests? What could be more un-American? Did we not prove our purity for all time in this respect when we took Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals away from him after discovering that he had once accepted live dollars for playing baseball in Dry Gulch, Oklahoma?

Up to now I have given the Russians the benefit of the doubt; but in this matter of paying their amateur athletes I am afraid that I shall have to say that they are very different from us. They give their athletes money; we give our athletes automobiles. We also give them free room and board, private tutors, private final examinations, special courses, first-class boat and plane fare to far places, and rooms in the best hotels. And furthermore, we do not even give these paltry things to an athlete if his father makes more than $50,000 a year.

It seems odd to us Americans that when we give ordinary and necessary things to our athletes, we become vulnerable to foreign propaganda. The reason it seems odd to us is this: we are products of the American Way of Life; we are gifted with a certain moral superiority over the rest of the world, especially the Eastern half, including France; and we are therefore able to make moral judgments, draw moral lines, and tread moral tightropes with a skill and delicate precision that is totally beyond the capacity of such people as the Russians. Wc are able to explain, for example, exactly why it is wrong and un-amateur for Jim Thorpe to accept one five-dollar bill from a semi-pro baseball club in Oklahoma, and why it is right, and quite amateur, for an American university to give each of its football players a five-dollar steak dinner at the training table every night throughout the season. Except Sundays. We also know why it is wrong for the Russian government to provide athletes with jobs that will give them the time and opportunity to engage in sport, anti why it is right for an American university to provide its boys with the same kind of jobs.

Such precise moral distinctions are easy for us to make; but the Russians are not anywhere near that far advanced. That is why they do not understand us. They even laugh at us. They call us hypocrites. Well, if there is going to be any understanding at all, we must try to understand the Russians. Since we are their moral superiors, it is the least we can do.

We must try to understand the Russians’ conception of amateurism and professionalism. They think — crudely enough, to be sure — that in this day of transcontinental and transoceanic engagements and long practice hours, the only person who can be unquestionably amateur is the one whose father makes at least $50,000 a year. Anyone else must receive some financial help. The Russians think that the man who receives one ruble is as much a pro as the man who receives a thousand rubles. They think that no judge on earth is such a brilliant moralist that he can say an athlete who gets $50 expense money is an amateur, but an athlete who gets $85.42 is a professional. We of course know that it is quite possible to draw such lines. We die! it very well in the case of Jim Thorpe, and we are doing it again in the case of Wes Santee. But when we do it, the Russians call us impostors, hypocrites, liars, and self-righteous fools.

They say that in addition to being hypocrites we are also poor sports, because we suggest strongly that t he Russian athletes are good only because they are paid and threatened; and if they weren’t paid and threatened they’d never have a chance against the Americans. According to the Russians, an assumption like that is not sporting. They say that the only reason we are sad and mad at them is that when we talk sternly of the difference between amateurs and professionals, we are playing a game with sport; and we are mad at the Russians because they are now beating us at our own game. They say that for a year we have been making excuses for our prospective defeat; and that is not saying much for the confidence we have in our boys’ ability to win in the clutch. They say, Come on, Yanks, don’t be afraid — we put on our pants the same as you.

Furthermore, say the Russians, we are not scientific. If we were scientific we would know that the country most likely to win is not the one with the most payments and threats; the country most likely to win is the one that has the fewest chronic spectators, the fewest chronic TY-watchers, the fewest hot-rods, the fewest golfers, and the most village arenas.

Well, that’s what we’ve got to deal with. They think they are right. We think we are right. I have a suspicion that both the Russians and the Americans have much in common in regard to training procedure for Olympic athletes. If that is true, then maybe the best thing for us to do is just to have a chuckle at ourselves, have one at them, shake hands, and may the best man win.