Voices from the Village

By Tom Callahan

"This is just how I've always dreamed it would be" Amid traffic so tolerable that it actually seems lighter than usual, in air so passable that smog is on sale by the bottle, under security so congenial that immediate fears have eased, with tickets so plentiful that face value has made a comeback, the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles have at least begun brilliantly.

The secret lamplighter of Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee President Peter Ueberroth turned out to be two: Gina Hemphill, granddaughter of Jesse Owens, and Rafer Johnson, 1960 decathlon champion. But then all of this summer's 4,200 torchbearers turned out to be remarkable. Winding around and about Southern California these past ten days of the 15,000-km relay, the path traced the same thread that has been tugging at the country since May, a trail of glad tears. George Allen, 62, a football coach of meager perspective who used to say, "Losing is like dying," progressed in one short kilometer to a point where he could admit, "This is more fun than beating Dallas." The great O.J. Simpson, 37, handed off to the great Michael Baily, 7, who has cerebral palsy. Lenore Nicholson-Woodward, 69, a bona fide "little old lady from Pasadena," almost overran the escort vehicles with her impatient heel-and-toe style. Back down the road in Louisville, Muhammad Ali had carried his torch too. In his book The Greatest,

Ali claimed to have tossed his Olympic gold boxing medal off an Ohio River bridge in 1960. But it's a funny thing. Nobody has ever believed him. He is at the Games now.

The final count of attending countries is 140, a record, with the Soviet Union and 16 sympathizers declining for reasons of either security or insecurity and two others demurring independently. Libya withdrew on the eve of the Games after two of its journalists, alleged to be terrorists, were refused U.S. entry. About 8,000 athletes are off on a farflung, 16-day spree splashed with hot pastel colors that might have been selected for their political insignificance or because this Olympiad is privately financed and they happened to be the shades on sale.

Calling to mind Jackson Pollock canvases, speckled draperies decorating the high fences at 23 venues actually look more like painters' dropcloths. But they do relieve the mood of the barbed wire (see DESIGN), and even the main villages at U.S.C. and UCLA are unforbidding. Strangely, no rifles and very few sidearms are in view. The only visible security forces, Ueberroth's Royal Blue Berets, are khaki-clad women and men as affable as park rangers. (Rest assured, there are hidden police gunmen.) Less than the customary Olympic access is being accorded the media. Once processed into the U.S.C. village, reporters have been quarantined just past the gate, a consideration probably involving privacy as much as security.

Some university employees still going about their campus business have been insulted by a shrill L.A.O.O.C. command not to speak to any athlete "even if he or she initiates the conversation."

The village landscape is not harmed by giant balloon-like umbilical cords streaming in the treetops and kept buoyant by ulterior fans. They are fascinating. The dormitories and other buildings given over to a "main street" of shops, a moviehouse, a beauty parlor and a disco have been redone in a profusion of violet squares, vermilion triangles and aqua stars piled chockablock on orange scaffolds beside pink-and-black-striped cardboard columns. Professor Stanley Weingart of the U.S.C. business school says, "I keep waiting for Dumbo the elephant to fly out." It does put one in mind of an amusement park. Although not Disneyland so much as Coney Island.

To Mary T. Meagher, a U.S. swimmer, the atmosphere is, simply, beautiful. For track stars, the Olympics may be a means, but for swimmers it is everything. They come to the Games prepared to laugh. "Let this, go out nationwide," proclaims Steve Lundquist. "I need a job. I'm keeping my ears open, and they certainly are big enough." Lundquist, 23, and Meagher, 19, are two of the sport's grizzled journeymen. She was a record holder at age five, a world champion by 14. Then, in 1980, what should have been Meagher's Olympics went on without her when the U.S. boycotted Moscow.

After an understandable slump--common among U.S. swimmers and something of a national malaise, as Jimmy Carter might say--Meagher rallied grandly. Now she can contemplate three golds. "The Pan-Am Games are great, the Worlds are wonderful," she says. "But the Olympics are the Olympics. Everyone walking around the village smiling, speaking their own language but understanding all the same. This is just how I've always dreamed it would be, maybe even more cheerful."

A crowd of laughing Rumanians, evidently not the soccer team, is kicking a spotted ball around a park bench. Nadia Comaneci, a guest of the L.A.O.O.C., is staying with her old team. "It is very bright and cheerful. I like everything very much," says the darling gymnast of Montreal. A Lebanese long jumper, Gabi Issa El Khouri, who could shave clear up to his eyes, is rolling them at the second most wonderful question put to him so far: Are Los Angeles and Beirut much different?

"Woooooo," he says, "we can say that!"

The first: Can he outjump Carl Lewis?

While Lewis may try to exceed 29 ft., El Khouri hopes to reach 25 ft. "Lewis will be too tough in the 100 meters and the long jump," says Gus Young, a Jamaican who lives in The Bronx and runs for North Carolina State, "and he'll have to be kept jumping a while to lose the 200. But we can beat him and the U.S. in the relay." Gus sounds absolutely convinced of it.

The Olympic spirit does not prevent rival boxers from occasionally saluting each other, just in passing, with a universal smile and an expressive forefinger dragged meaningfully across the throat.

Paul Gonzales laughs at first, then stares off in the direction of his toughest fight.

"They take a lot of punches, boy, Koreans," he says absently. Not a 10-min.

drive from the Olympic Village is Aliso Village, where Gonzales, 20, was reared, where he survived a shotgun blast to the back of the head at twelve, where he narrowly ducked another bullet just two months ago, and where as yet no pastel pennants have arrived.

Gonzales is a light flyweight, a good boxer when he remembers to be. "I've been a hothead, but I'm not going for that macho trip this time," he promises. "If someone catches me with an elbow, I mean to drop back, collect myself and box. I'm going to be the first Mexican-American to win a gold medal." It pleases him that some of the volunteer workers in the Olympic Village have familiar faces.

He recognizes them from Aliso Village. "Even old gang members. They're shocked to see me too. I'm proud that they are working, especially for free." If he wins, Gonzales says he will stand them all to a block party.

Winning this week has probably not occurred to Kathy Johnson, 24, America's oldest woman gymnast, 5 ft. tall, 100 lbs., blond, lovely, lonely, happy and sad. But other things have, as she nears the finish of a 13-year devotion, wondering what all the athletes must eventually decide, whether it is worth it. "I've never been to a prom. I was always out of town," she says slowly. "Six girls make the Olympic team every four years, and if that's your dream, it's tough. Because when everyone else goes to get ice cream, you will have to go get sweaty instead. Of course they haven't felt the highs I've felt--they've felt different ones, sure.

'So-and-so asked me to the dance.' And that's great, maybe even just as good. But I've thought about it quite a lot, and, I'll tell you, I wouldn't trade the feelings of complete satisfaction that I've had in athletics.

It's not just the Olympics. It's not. It's the trip along the way, maybe just a single routine in practice, one perfect moment."

Perfection is not copyrighted by the Games. Nor, indeed, ensured. Nothing could prevent a mad motorist from driving a gruesome path through a sidewalk crowd (see NATION). Nothing could slow down the athletic world's ostracism of South Africa; it was extended to ignoring that country's journalists, even those from media that have historically campaigned against apartheid. Since South Africa is not a member of the International. Olympic Committee family, it just does not exist. The I.O.C. issues no credentials and the L.A.O.O.C. arranges no television feeds for phantoms. Also unacknowledged are eleven murdered Israelis of 1972. A repeated request for a simple moment of silence, or any other Olympic commemoration of that black day in Munich, is still denied.

In any case, logistical questions are getting more attention than moral ones now. As the visiting spectators began to arrive last week, regular commuters were so good about avoiding what the traffic people charmingly call the "impact zones" that some fear that Los Angeles drivers (those who have not fled town) may be shortly lulled into resuming their ordinary ways. They could even come to the Games. Local newspapers burst with ads for tickets of every stripe, not all placed by overambitious travel agents or venal speculators. Not a few poor fans misunderstood the system or unstrategically overordered and have landed them selves in the ticket-brokering business on a big scale. A brisk market also developed in team pins, something of an Olympic tradition. "It's not like just a football game or something," said Cathy Fresh water, a supermarket checker and souvenir canvasser. "I'm going to be late for work but it's worth it."

Those who have not been downtown recently will find even it has been spruced up. At the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles Street, the stubbly men are listing with great formality. A rental shop donated about 200 out-of-fashion tuxedos to the image of the city. If nothing else, foreign visitors must concede, no where in the world are the bums better dressed.

--By Tom Callahan