Barcelonan Nights
© William Olson, 2011
Hello. My name is British Properties. I’m a former jock—I suppose that’s the best place to start for this story. A mid-distance runner. In high school, I could run with the big dogs in the dashes, but by the time my collegiate years rolled around, my frame—and I suppose my zeal for beer—relegated me to the longer races. High speed just wasn’t my brand.
I nearly ran for the Air Force too. One of their recruiters had offered me a scholarship and had made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if I took the ride, I’d avoid going to Viet Nam. ‘Come run for me in Colorado Springs,’ I can recall him saying, ‘and you’ll never have to chase after Charlie.’ I turned him down, and I think on it now how these little twists of fate in life can make all the difference later down the line. I’m no military man.
I nearly enrolled at Oxford, but opted for the University of Chicago instead. And after four years, one of my teachers, Victor Turner, insisted I stay for my PhD. Jesus, I never thought I’d stay in Chicago for so long. But here I am, still here, some forty years later. I actually live in Oak Park now, which is just outside the city, but I’ll always consider the south side—Hyde Park—my real home; it’s where I work and do all my big thinking. Though I should say, it’s my ‘side job,’ as I like to call it, that keeps this old runner’s heart racing, and which informs my story about the Olympic Games.
So how did I get into the Olympics? Well, I suppose it was because I wasn’t good enough to compete in them. I had failed to qualify for the 1968 games in Munich—another remarkable twist of fate in my life. And it’s those things at which I fail, it seems, that leave the biggest chip on my shoulder—and which animate me most. So I figured if I couldn’t hack it as a world-class athlete, I should try my hand at world-class scholarship.
And so I was on my way, my path. I wrote my dissertation on Olympic Sport and, the following year, wrote a NYTimes best selling biography of the modern Games’ founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertain. I made a decent buck in royalties too. But I should back up a bit...
My Olympic research, in earnest, began in Switzerland. I had done a great deal of my field work in Lausanne. And I’ve come to really adore the Swiss. And the French too. Jesus, I miss those days. The people at the International Olympic Committee’s headquarters were more than kind to me. Anything I needed, those librarians there would get it for me. I suppose my youth played a part in it too—what the hell, I had good looks as a kid, and I was still sporting my runner’s frame those days. What harm could have come from shagging a young librarian or two working at the IOC’s headquarters? None. None in my case anyway.
My research explored, primarily, the history of Olympic Sport, and the life of de Coubertain in particular. But it was the anthropology of the phenomenon of the Games that interested me most—the liminality of it all. I suppose it was best though, that I didn’t pursue that line of inquiry too far—that I kept to the less esoteric. I don’t think it would have been as well received if I had done otherwise. I recall one of my dissertation readers though, Leo Strauss, telling me that he hated it. ‘It’s almost rustic,’ he had said, ‘too intelligible to the masses. This would fly at Northwestern, but not Chicago.’ Ah well. Anyway, this is how I got my feet wet in the Olympics.
Over the years, I became ever more involved in the Games. I attend them all, of course, but most of my personal contact with the Games’ inner circles has come about through my consulting to bid cities. The Games have become so goddamn commercialized and bound up in the minds of city boosters—and they’re always on the lookout for those ‘in the know.’ It’s a game of big bucks now, period. Cities now spend a fortune in trying to land the Games. But I’m a University of Chicago guy—a real Chicago guy: I don’t accept money for any of the consulting I do.
I did some light work for Sydney to help them win the 2000 Games, and quite a bit for Athens when they went after the ‘04 Games. Athens, in particular, I really enjoyed—what an amazing group of people there. I had a full-throated Xerxes-at-the-Hellespont moment when I jogged onto the infield amid the ruins of Olympia too. Yeah, my experience in Athens sort of sealed my fate with Olympic bidding. After that, there was London, which I can guarantee would not have landed the 2012 Games without my help. And you can imagine, when we tried to bring the Games to Chicago for 2016, I worked my fucking tail off. I’m still bitter over the Chicago fiasco. Those assholes at the NOC in Colorado Springs...ah...don’t get me started.
But of all my memories of the Olympics, it was the Games in Barcelona of 1992 that I cherish most. It was the year the American basketball ‘Dream Team’ was assembled. Man, I’ll tell you, it was a circus-carnival to watch those giants move around the city. How I hooked up with the team is a story unto itself, but what came to pass while I was with them is what I think you’ll find most interesting. Shit, how many people can say they drank beers with Charles Barkely on La Rambla? Or visited the Joan Miró museum with Michael Jordan? And this was just afternoon fun. The nightlife there was something else.
In truth though, I wasn’t there for the nightlife. I was there to do research. I was provided an all-access pass to the Games in Barcelona—to do my field work with the athletes, interview family members of the athletes, meet with the figure-heads of the International Olympic Committee. It’s one of the most amazing feats of identification to see—this all-access pass; I saw one go for $1,000 on Ebay a few weeks after the Games. Thick, impregnable, rigid—the lettering on them, I was told, was made from 22-karat gold. And they had this hologrammed infinity symbol at the badge’s center that breached the bounds of magic. There was nowhere in Barcelona I couldn’t go.
I met Bill and Hillary Clinton there too, for lunch one day. I knew them through connections Hillary and I shared in Chicago. Bill had just sealed the Democratic nomination, but he was hardly as popular at the time—and, though I still speak on occasion to Hillary, I haven’t seen either since. I recall Bill ribbing with me as the African women’s track team walked past our table outside the Palau Güell mansion. ‘Wouldn’t mind a taste of that chocolate,’ he had said.
So I got all my field work done, had plenty of time to take in the touristy stuff, and I had even typed out a few pages of notes. Things were winding down, and it had been a wild week.
It was my last night there—the Dream Team had already taken the gold—that my stay forever changed the history of the Olympics. Where shall I begin..?
Well, maybe starting from our hotel within the Olympic Village would be best. Very well: I remember taking along an old favorite for my trip, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I had taught a class on Hemingway for each of the last five years. No matter the number of times, I never tired of Bells. I was sitting in the hotel’s lobby with Larry Bird, and we got to talking. He too was a fan of Hemingway. ‘I read Papa my sophomore year in French Lick,’ he had said, ‘and I’ve been a fan ever since.’ Then Karl Malone sat down next to me.
Karl and I strained to hold a conversation. He wasn’t much into reading, I surmised. And it wasn’t until Scottie Pippen called him from the elevator, (‘Yo, yo, Mailman. Let’s do this,’) that we were relieved of the awkwardness of silence. I went back to chatting with Bird until the rest of the gang showed up.
In full, six of us left the hotel together: Bird, Pippen, Malone, Patrick Ewing, Magic Johnson—I know, I know—and yours truly. It took three cabs and ten bruised knees, but we were shortly at a restaurant in the city’s Barconeleta neighborhood. Bird said he loved fish, and insisted on going there.
A quick note about dining with sports stars: Wear your finest shoes and a nice jacket. They don’t opt for cheap fare.
Dinner was nice, but it wasn’t all shits and giggles. It’s hard to describe the conspicuity I felt. Never before, or after, have I experienced conspicuity in this way. To be this close to celebrity—to be, in effect, a part of celebrity—was something I found disorienting and slightly unpleasant. The flashes of cameras in themselves were sufficient to annoy me. But it was those people with insulting gall—those who would insist upon an autograph or a handshake with the athletes—that caused me the most discomfort. The stream of them never seemed to stop.
No, I don’t envy those players much. Hell, Michael Jordan was seldom able to leave the hotel—though I wonder if the casino downstairs didn’t have something to do with it. Nah, I wouldn’t trade my life for theirs; let them have their sports cars and women—there’s something comforting in anonymity.
So we ate. And drank. Man, did we drink. I had no idea such large men could be such lightweights either. Except for Bird. Bird drank like a sailor. So we were feeling pretty good. We finished and paid. And wow, the tip Magic left was staggering. Then we hit a club.
Now I’m not a young man anymore. Nor was I much the spring chicken when I went to Barcelona—I had just celebrated my fortieth, I think. So I felt a bit out of place with all these kids. Still, I was along for the ride, and I had been designated by the IOC as the team’s unofficial ‘citizen-chaperone’ besides. I suppose I felt some sort of obligation. But really, it was just cool to hang out with those guys. You’d be surprised: they talk a lot politics, and they’re pretty up-to-date on things. Patrick Ewing and I even chatted at one point over dinner about homosexuals in the military. (Forgive this short digression, but it was Ewing who first suggested what came to be known as the military’s doctrine of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ He described it to me, and I thought it made enough sense to call Hillary after I had returned to the States. It wasn’t long after that Bill first proposed the policy. But enough of this.)
So the club we entered was a zoo. I can’t think of any other way to describe it. And the girls were all over these guys. It looked to be all in good fun until Pippen hoisted a local to his shoulders. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She lifted her shirt up too—she was quite the busty Spanish girl. To see her so high up there—it made me slightly uneasy. But it wasn’t until he brought her down that there might be reason for genuine concern: Bird had caught wind of the girl, and he moved in on her.
As so often happens, our party dispersed. It was easy enough, though, to spot everyone—Jesus, their shoulders towered a full six inches over the heads of everyone else there. But Bird soon had vanished. I had presumed he had left with the girl.
About an hour later, our group came back together. Still no sign of Bird, but we left anyway. It must have been close to midnight. These guys are party animals at heart, but they all know better than to stay out too late—especially in a foreign city. They stick out like sore thumbs in the first place, and their long fingers are mostly bound in gold in the second. On the way back to the hotel, Ewing recounted the time he was mugged outside the Garden after a game. ‘It’s hard to imagine. You’d be amazed with some of these people,’ he had said, ‘This fucker was like, “Twenty-five points tonight, eh? Fuck you, gimme your wallet.”’ I could imagine it.
As we turned into the Olympic Village and onto the street leading to our hotel, I saw the lights. It was the police. The horror of an incident between Bird and his Spanish girlfriend crossed my mind. But it was worse than that.
There had been a botched bomb attempt, though a small fire had nevertheless broken out. I pieced as much from a chat with one of the officers, and I managed a quick translation to the two others in the cab with me: Ewing and Pippen. We got out of the cab, but that was as far as we could go. The entire hotel had been cordoned off, and we were the last car to be admitted into Olympic Village.
The planners for the Barcelona Games had done a marvelous job: There was new infrastruture—the tram, the roads, the airport—everywhere, and the city was done up with an air of extravagance. But they had done a real shitty job with the accommodations within the Olympic Village itself. I had heard they had received a faulty head-count, because the week before the Games started, they were knocking out walls within the living quarters in order to squeeze in more beds. I’m not exaggerating when I say that there wasn’t a single vacancy within the Village. And it was getting late too. The idea of trying to find another room in the city never really crossed my mind. No, not gonna happen.
We were directed to an administrative building just up the street within the Village. I saw someone outside it I recognized from the IOC—one of the delegates from Greece. I hadn’t worked closely with him on the Athens bid, but I knew him—his first name anyway: Nicolas. Which was plenty given the circumstances. He recognized me too. He directed us to a van that was stationed around back of the building. ‘It’ll take you to a place with emergency lodging,’ he said. So we went.
I live on a university professor’s income. My book sales no longer amount to more than negligible. I live, I would say, comfortably—but not opulently. What I witnessed then, amidst this ‘emergency’ lodging facility, made my stomach turn. It was an old mansion just outside of the city limits—another of Gaudí’s works. If the ceilings weren’t twenty feet high, I’d teach for a year at a community college.
As a rental, I thought the mansion slightly obscene, so when I learned it was actually owned by the IOC, I became all the more disgusted. There was music—I recall hearing Ottmar Liebert; and there was dancing, imported liquors, a chocolate fountain larger than a Volkswagen, and about three dozen topless women serving hors d’oeuvres. And there other women as well. Just when I thought I had all my fieldwork done.
There was a time I sincerely had believed in the Olympics. That they really did make a difference in the world. That they did something beneficial in the way of promoting international peace. No longer, though. Those fuckers. I felt vaguely sick about the whole production. Though I did enjoy the hors d’oeuvres.
My flight left the following morning. An official with the IOC assured me my luggage and belongings still within my room would be sent to my home in Chicago. And I was sad to leave. I said my farewells—Bird had reappeared before I hopped a cab and had signed a few photos I took for my kids. Magic gave me a big bear hug, and Pippen teased me with a high five I couldn’t reach. And that was the last I saw of them—the basketball team had chartered their own jet. And I flew American, coach-class. This now irked me. I fathomed the flight accommodations of the delegates to the IOC.