Remarks to the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 3, 1995

The President. Thank you. This is a pretty lively crowd. Mayor Campbell, thank you for welcoming me back to Atlanta. I'm glad to be back. I'm glad to be here with Billy Payne and Andrew Fleming and all the leaders of the Olympics, LeRoy Walker and others.

You know, I was listening to Billy Payne talk, and I was thinking it really would have been a shame if the world had been deprived of all that energy and the Olympics had gone someplace else. [Laughter] My granddaddy used to say that people like Billy Payne are the kind of folks who sell hospitalization to shut-ins. [Laughter] I believe he could talk an owl out of a tree. [Laughter] The more you think about that the funnier it will get. [Laughter]

I'm glad to see my good friend, Andrew Young, here. He was a great Ambassador for you, recently, when he spoke at the annual President's Prayer Breakfast, the congressional prayer breakfast in Washington, DC. And I thank him for all he has done over the years, especially on the Olympics.

This is a great endeavor. I can't imagine that Herbert Hoover refused to open the Olympics. That's probably why he was a one-termer. [Laughter] All this time we've been reading in our history books it was because of the Depression; turned out it was the Olympics. [Laughter]

I don't think - Herbert Hoover didn't like athletics very much because he was the first President who got a lower salary than a baseball player. [Laughter] Now the lowest paid baseball players make five times what the President makes - [laughter] - but back then the priorities were different. Babe Ruth was the first baseball player who ever made more than the President. And they asked him - they said, "It's the middle of the Depression. You're making more than the President of the United States. What do you have to say about that?" He said, "I ought to be. I'm having a better year." [Laughter]

You know, a lot of things happen here in Atlanta. I saw the other night on television Michael Jordan had his first buzzer beater since coming back, you know, in Atlanta. You didn't like that, but it was nice for the rest of us. [Laughter] Georgia is going to the Final Four of the Women's NCAA. Playing Tennessee. [Laughter] We have a ticket here - don't you think one of us ought to be for Georgia? [Laughter]

I am delighted to be here. I came here mostly to say a simple thank-you to all of you. You have no idea, I think, what you are doing for the United States. This is a great endeavor, and it is an endeavor that is just as much about cooperation as it is about competition. It's about cooperation because of the teamwork required to put this endeavor together. It's about cooperation because a lot of these sports are team sports. It's about cooperation because the competition, even in the individual sports, requires a rigorous adherence to certain ethical rules of conduct which make the competition honorable and honored when over. That is true for the Olympics, it is true for the Paralympics, and therefore, in what you are doing, you are upholding the very best in this country.

The facilities are great. The technology is great. Don't you like hearing the Vice President talk about technology? [Laughter] You know, I thought I was a policy wonk until I had Al Gore as Vice President and Newt Gingrich as Speaker. It's amazing. [Laughter] Now I feel like the linesman at the tennis match. I just - out, in, let. [Laughter]

I told them the other day - you know, we're up there, fighting about the school lunch program and the food stamp program, and I found a technological fix for them. We should scrap the school lunch program and substitute E-mail stamps that would give you virtual food that everybody could download on the Internet. [Laughter] They're going to explain to me next week why that won't work, when I get back. [Laughter]

I want to say, too, that I appreciate the Olympic force. You're going to have 50,000 volunteers working on this, and then you're going to have - you've got 770,000 people in this Olympic force working in community service projects. That's an amazing thing. Nothing like that has ever been done, take my word for it, around anything like this before. And it probably would only happen in the United States. But again, it reinforces the fact that if you have enough spirit and enough vision and you're willing to cooperate, you can get just about anything done you want to do.

And if you ask me what I hope would come out of this, it would be that. This is a remarkable endeavor. There will be some winners and some losers. There will be some things that don't go right. There will be occasional accidents. As the Vice President said, we offer our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Jack Falls, who was killed in the accident, working on the Olympic stadium, and to those who were injured, David Oakes and Bruce Griffin. But we know that in the course of human endeavor, if people work together and they try to bring out the best in each other, and they play by rules that are honorable and clear and widely respected, that there is nearly nothing that cannot be done.