Playing Olympic Games

AS MORE AND MORE PEOPLE get arrested outside South African embassies, as more and more South African officials are prevented from leaving buildings, as more and more college administrators begin to fear that their buildings will be occupied by student activists, there is one inevitable confrontation on this issue that I already dread: the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Naively, I hadn't even thought about the prospect of an anti-apartheid boycott until I read the "Sports People" column in last Sunday's New York Times. In a non-threatening tidbit, the Times reported that Harry Edwards, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, announced that he would lead a boycott if South African athletes were allowed to compete.

I must be pretty dense not to have thought of it sooner, especially when I learned from the article that Mr. Edwards was the organizer of the protest by Black athletes of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. That boycott didn't work as well as he had hoped, but he probably gained some satisfaction from the fact that two Black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, held up their black-gloved, fist-clenched hands in the "Black power" salute while on the medal stand after winning the gold and bronze, respectively, in the 200-meter dash.

Mr. Edwards, who predicted the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, told a symposium on ethics in college athletics that the next boycott will be led by both Black and white athletes protesting South Africa's racist system of apartheid.

Edwards probably realized that his statement wouldn't win him any popularity contests, but that didn't seem to bother him much. He said, according to the Times. "I'm one of the least popular people in this country. Most people don't like me, anyway. They never did. Not because of anything I've done, but because I'm Black."

I've never met the man, so I can't say whether I like him or not. But if I do meet him someday, and I discover that I don't like him, it won't be because he's Black. Instead, it will probably be because of what he's done, and what he's trying to do.

OBVIOUSLY, IT'S NOT his cause that bother me. Just like the issue of civil rights for American Blacks at the '68 Olympics, the issue of apartheid is something that calls for stand-taking. The South African government deserves all the pressure that can be brought upon it, and in my opinion, that includes divestment by multi-national corporations doing business there. A symbolic gesture? Maybe. But I happen to be a firm believer in the power of symbolism.

So it would seem hypocritical of me to draw the line at the Olympic playing field. You can't get more symbolic than the Olympics, with all those national flags, national anthems and numerous other nationalistic things. The Olympic arena is commonly viewed as the arena of world politics, with the U.S. and Soviet Union each trying to prove itself better than the other while all the other "little" countries try to show the superpowers up. If I support such a drastic action as divestment, an Olympic boycott would seem natural. After all, a boycott-supporter might justifiably ask, how can a Black man with any self-respect compete with a "representative" of South Africa's racist regime?

When confronted with that question, I wish Jesse Owens were alive to answer it. Most American schoolkids, and anyone who has seen at least five episodes of ABC's Wide World of Sports, know about Owens. He was the Black athlete who participated in the 1936 Olympics--held in, of all places, Berlin. And not just any old Berlin, but a Berlin awash in swastikas. A Berlin presided over by a man with a funny mustache who spouted ludicrous theories about the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of most others, including, of course, the Black race.

But Owens went to Berlin, however much he was disgusted by Hitler, the Nazts, and the swastikas. He happened to win some gold medals, too, right under Hitler's nose.

But even if Jim McKay takes Owens's success to be the lesson of the whole affair, I don't think his gold medals mattered much. Although Owens was probably well aware of the irony as he stood on the medal stand, I'd like to think that he took pleasure in his mere participation at the Games. I'd like to think that he didn't see his medals is a justified attempt to rub the Nazis' roses in the dirt, but as an attempt to show that he and other athletes were above politics.

I think Edwards and any athletes contemplating a boycott; should take Owens's action to heart. Owens probably would have gone to the Olympics even if they were held in Johannesburg. He probably knew that you can never eliminate all the injustice in the world, and that it would be futile to boycott the Olympics because of it. That doesn't mean an athlete shouldn't take action against injustice when he's off the playing field. But on the playing field, well, that's something different: it's a place where a Black man and an "Aryan" German can shake hands after competing against each other in a race (which really happened back in 1936).

THE POINT is not to ignore politics, but to place ourselves, as athletes, coaches, officials and spectators, above it, if only once in a while. It is precisely because politics can become so base and disgusting--as evidenced by Nazi Germany, or South Africa today--that we have to be above it occasionally, in order to reaffirm whatever shaky kind of faith we have in humanity.

Idealistic? Definitely. But I happen to be a firm believer in idealism, and idealism seems to be what the Olympics are all about in the first place. When we forget that, and fail to rise above the frequent baseness of politics, we must confront the blood of Israeli weighlifters--as in Munich in 1972--a boycott by 26 Black African nations in 1976, an American-led boycott by 55 nations in 1980, and a retaliatory Soviet boycott in 1984.

But Owens's inspirational actions aside, I don't have much hope of salvaging the 1988 Olympics from anti-apartheid politics. The issue of apartheid cuts deep, and will be harder for athletes, both white and Black to ignore. But in they don't the point of the Olympics will be lost once again, as was in 1972, 1976, 1980 and 1984 I can only hope that people really don't like the boycott Mr. Edwards--and not because he's Black.