Downhill & slippery: CBS goes to the Olympics - 1994 Winter Olympics

It's Saturday, February 26, 1994, and last night in Lillehammer Nancy Kerrigan got a silver medal, Tonya Harding did uh, something--and CBS picked up a record 48.5 share of the viewing audience--which is, like, they wake you up and force you to watch the show. Ever since Nancy got whacked at the nationals, America had been in breath-bated expectation of the Showdown in Norway; and as, over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that everybody in Tonya's circle, except maybe Tonya herself and maybe her fourth-grade piano teacher, was in on the whacking, the anticipation was all-consuming. Come on: could any other story have shunted Michael Jackson into the slow lane of the information superhighway?

Don't worry; this isn't another Tonya-and-Nancy piece. It isn't even a piece about sports. I don't like sports. I leave the den when they start skating because I can't bear to see anybody fall on his or her butt. I never learned to swim, so for me Jaws is a they-go-in-the-water-they-get-what-they-deserve movie. Watching base- or any other kind of ball I find about as.exhilarating as reading the letters of William James, if that's not unfair to William James. Chess and straight pool; those are my sports, because with them, you can drink and smoke while you play the game.

This is, however, a piece about the idea of sport, which has obsessed me for years, perhaps just because I am so metaphysically unathletic; and about how bad was the CBS coverage of the 1994 Olympics.

They cleaned up, of course. The network simply obliterated its competition during the games. Because the modern Olympics is, let's face it, a cash cow of cosmic dimensions, as non-un-watchable as and only a little less overhyped than the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. Nancy/Tonya aside, once every four years Americans get all dewy-eyed about things like luge, which is basically you lie on your back on a cafeteria tray and slide down a mountain of ice. And what about the two-man luge? An intrinsic evil, as far as I can make out.

But why this quadrennial passion about events that, othertimes, don't even make prime time on the cable channels? Blame it on Karl Marx. It was the cold war that made the games. The reasoning was, though nobody made it explicit, that since we couldn't really nuke the Evil Empire we could sure whup them pesky Commies on the slopes, on the ice, wherever. And now the Berlin Wall is down, the Evil Empire. has decayed back into a tossed salad of internecine, medieval hatreds, and the song is over: but the malady lingers on.

And you can whiff the profit-motive like garlic in a Pizza Hut. Ask the truly sublime Kati Wilt if, when she skated for the GDR in 1988, she wasn't thinking about the perks that would come with a gold medal. Ask any of the top contenders if, as they practice, visions of Wheaties boxes don't dance in their heads. Sister Harding deserves some kind of medal for saying, long before the Nancywhacking, that she wanted the gold because it meant Big Bucks. Honesty can be bracing.

The claim of the modern Olympics, with its billion-dollar panoply of advertising and endorsement deals, to be a selfless and idealistic international competition is, if such a thing can be, a charming and rather sweet hypocrisy: sort of like your always-snockered maiden aunt who insists that she only occasionally takes a sherry before dinner. This year, though, things tipped over the edge: badly. On the next-to-last day of coverage, CBS Sports President Neal Pilson, talking about the first, Thursday night skateoff between you-know-who and youknow-who, announced: "I don't think if we sat down to try to script an Olympics we would have done much better....I think this is as good as any fiction could be." Exactly. Alas.

What distinguishes a game from a fiction is that you can't make a game turn out the way you want it to. And that' s very important. Both games and fictions, of course, are artificial versions of that sloppy monster, Life: they're ordered contests or quests we impose upon the stuff of just living, day-to-day. And I think, as a species, we need them both, and need them desperately.

But they don't mix. I assume that our hairier and harried ancestors played games (rock, scissors, and paper, maybe) before they told stories (the guy who killed the saber-toothed tiger, probably). Because the game is, psychically, at the midpoint between the monster Life and the benevolent angel Fiction (or myth or story or what you will). Like fiction, it is controlled, with rules and closure. Like life, it is chancy and, in the words of the philosopher Yogi Berra, not over till it's over. Chess or mudwrestling, makes no nevermind: the game catches both the sense of order that life misses and the sense of the unforeseen that fiction lacks. When Homer and Virgil took so much time to describe the funeral games of fallen warriors, they were in fact, as aboriginal storytellers, nodding toward the one, crucial transitional stage between the chaos of being and the certainties of myth.