ALAN B. SOMERS: Taking Brundage Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World
Maraniss, David
slope”), fretting instead over how the little people (“somewhat mindless, passive decision makers”) will react to nudges, warning that “choice architects” must understand how to “encourage socially...
...Again, Nudge: Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time...
...Nudge: The bottom line, from our point of view, is that people are, shall we say, nudge-able...
...According to VA studies, the human mind can take, maximum, 240 days of combat before it simply shuts down...
...They had said goodbye...
...What his eyes said was too powerful for a simple journalist to attempt repeating...
...He also believes that the Olympics affected South African racial policies...
...I saw horror...
...Thanks to his severity, young swimmers, like myself, were prevented from even checking clothing baskets into swimming pools, as that would make us professional athletes...
...However, he does not make a very good case for his thesis that this particular Olympiad changed the world...
...He’s doing what he’s doing because it feels good...
...He had been in the camps for a year...
...his breath while skirting the snake pit of paralyzing memory...
...Cambodian villager speaking to U.S...
...To put Brundage into perspective, he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1909 as a civil engineer...
...So, in that nice French restaurant, Jean-Pierre’s on K Street, I’d asked him how he had done this if in fact they dared not talk...
...Angka wants to see you,” was how sheldon Kelly,a former Reader’s Digest staff writer, lives in Chesapeake, Virginia...
...B aron De coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics, tried to deemphasize such chauvinism in the Games, but the combination of the nationalistic press and the seemingly hard-wired nationalism of the spectators will not allow the old baron’s transnational ideal to take hold...
...Moreover, it was certainly If the reader is expecting a comprehensive report of the 1960 Games, he will be disappointed...
...ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 75 death sentences were announced...
...It is almost clinical in its explanation of what happened—of what it was like inside this modern, very true Holocaust...
...Wealthy people were necessary to manage the Olympic movement...
...And yet, Sichan had described to me their having said goodbye...
...headlines, and frankly I am disappointed that Maraniss, in the welter of facts and anecdotes he brings to this book, never mentions my heroics...
...i met sichan siv many years ago while reporting for the Reader’s Digest...
...During a recent interview with Denver Magazine, Barack Obama admitted his two young daughters “definitely don’t think I’m a rock star” and that they so far had little interest in the presidential race...
...An American from Cambodia “You are a Man of Golden Bones...
...That is a matter he well documents...
...Here’s Nudge, for example, on the war between our dual-personality inner selves, The Planner (“the Mr...
...As the century wore on and totalitarian states entered the Olympics, this old gent may have lost sense of how the world was changing...
...there were no words...
...But, I had to know...
...They died kneeling, bending their necks down so pointed hoes could be driven into their brainstem...
...He revels in both, in his childhood, his school learning, his Cambodian family, and his doomed mother...
...Despite my dissatisfaction that he missed my hairy performance, I am indebted to him for stoking old memories...
...As I figure it, he was 11 years old when these Games occurred...
...With our eyes,” Sichan had said...
...He had fallen into a booby trap, almost impaling himself on killer punji sticks, had followed the path of the westerly sun and moon...
...I wrote about him, his extraordinary journey out of Cambodia, and his extraordinary journey as a new American...
...Avery Brundage, president of the IOC in 1960, is savaged by Maraniss for allegedly being a Nazi sympathizer, an autocrat, a plutocrat, delusional, and a philanderer of the sort that Maraniss never found particularly offensive when he wrote his Clinton biography...
...Enemies”—the literate, those who wore glasses, or simply had started their march with nice clothes—were killed...
...In reality it is the other way around...
...Madness, despair, suicides, death by sheer exhaustion and starvation...
...My ever-charitable wife diagnosed this behavior as “separation anxiety,” and in search of a cure I purchased Paul Owens’s The Dog Whisperer...
...These were worldwide political and social issues that affected the Olympics.The Red Chinese imposed on the International Olympic Committee to force the Nationalist Chinese to adopt the name Taiwan for their team...
...By the time you’ve reached the death camps, you should know why and how you got there...
...Sichan Siv escaped the communist Khmer Rouge killing fields in 1976 and made his way across the frontier jungle to a Thai refugee camp...
...the first with any significant television exposure...
...Well, it was “again...
...But I did make worldwide Money from television, commercial endorsements, and government has had more to do with changing the Games than anything...
...Before he ignored the professionalism of Soviet athletes, he ignored the heinousness of Nazism and allowed the Games to go on in 1936 in Berlin...
...South Africa was not readmitted until 1992...
...But why would Johnson not lead the American contingent into the Games...
...In short, Sichan seems to hurry through the hell— and we all must understand...
...And so, as an experiment I’d insisted upon, we talked for a while ourselves—using only our eyes...
...It was probably the first Olympics he was aware of...
...ambassador to a UN body—representing us throughout the world—you will know why he repeats his mother’s enduring words, and her last ones to him, to “never give up hope...
...I understand...
...Rather than change the world I endeavored to prevent change...
...The subtitle of this book is dead-on...
...I felt myself catching my breath, slipping near tears...
...If you’ve seen the movie The Killing Fields, you might understand...
...Hitler was reincarnated as Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot—more than two million executed, and half that number forever missing...
...Angka” was the faceless, invisible machine that drove the maddened homicidal illiterate teenagers with their red kramas and rubber-tire sandals...
...During a return in 1980 he learned that, indeed, shortly after his escape an announcement had been made to his brother that “Angka wants to see you,” and he and Sichan’s entire family had been led off to the jungle and were never seen again...
...Sichan had been in the war as a Cambodian CARE worker prior to the Khmer Rouge entering Phnom Penh, the capital city...
...Olympic innocence ended long before 1960...
...Currently, I notice it is in one titled Cultures in Diversity...
...Equally powerful political forces prevailed on the IOC to demand integration of the South African Olympic team...
...I was not aware either of our fleeting innocence or of our role in changing the world...
...Maraniss makes clear that he is one of those liberals always eager for change...
...F irst, a Disclaimer...
...Sichan was there...
...M y reason for telling you this is that I think Sichan today has backed sensibly away from all those horrifying “triggers...
...The Dog Whisperer: You can shape virtually any behavior you want from your dog, including wagging his tail at various speeds, a very fast or very slow sit, sneezing three times in a row, or nodding his head yes and no...
...Unless you have a burning interest in the subject, your time could be better spent on other pursuits...
...What a portrait that paints of the average American...
...I realized I had to avoid “triggers” to these terrible memories of his...
...So, tell us again, what do you mean we, Kemosabe...
...He sees some special poignancy with political overtones in the great black athlete Rafer Johnson carrying the United States flag at the opening ceremonies while civil right demonstrations were agitating the home front...
...Land mines, deadly snakes, communist outposts and camps: he made it, was jailed, released, became a Buddhist monk, with shaved head and eyebrows and saffron robe...
...We learned to talk with our eyes...
...Brundage then went on to become quite rich running a Chicago construction firm...
...By the time you’ve gotten to America, where he went from picking apples for two dollars a bushel to U.S...
...Admittedly, something went wrong in the finals, and I finished last...
...One fall day many years ago while dining in a nice French restaurant in Washington, D.C., I gently refused to let Sichan nudge me away from those times...
...I n a strange twist of journalistic serenDipity, I began reading Nudge the same week the sim mering destructive campaign of my year-old pug Benny erupted into a merciless disembowelment of our sofa...
...Today money abounds from television, commercial endorsements, and government...
...Actually, after reading this book I got to wondering why the author became so intrigued by the 1960 Olympics...
...Maraniss states that “the contest shimmered with performances that remain among the most golden in athletic history...
...Spock lurking within you”) and The Doer (“everyone’s Homer Simpson”): The Planner is trying to promote your long-term welfare but must cope with the feelings, mischief and strong will of the Doer, who is exposed to the temptations that come with arousal...
...Now, as a friend and close reader, on to Sichan’s always poignant and, incredibly, sometimes humorous memoir— written in his own natural, eloquent hand, sans ghostwriter or workshops...
...Maraniss suggests the Olympics had an impact on the Red China–Nationalist China (aka Taiwan) issue, regarding rights to the name China...
...That is why we watch them for two weeks every four years...
...At least from those Games we now have the stirring images of Jesse Owens displeasing Hitler...
...He then competed for another nine years, and one suspects he was not subsidized in any way, thus contributing to his austere vision of amateurism...
...Yes, he returned to Cambodia with Martha, his beautiful all-American Texas-born wife of 25 years, and yes, he confronted his demons, as he told me recently...
...Ambassador Siv, referring to the Khmer myth of one having very good luck...
...Keeping our budding national cult away from fatty foods and saving for retirement without any neo-lemmings wandering off to the refrigerator for a cool glass of cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid is the cross choice architects must bear...
...Like a biography of Avery Brundage written by David Maraniss...
...Later he taught English to refugees, served those most in need, and withdrew inside himself...
...The world was changing whether 1960 was an Olympic year or not...
...Maraniss has uncovered antics worthy of the Keystone Kops surrounding our State Department, the CIA, the 74 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 KGB, and the Soviets, which reveals some of the fatuousness of the Olympics as an extension of the Cold War...
...He does explode NBC’s view of the 1960 Olympics...
...Three years later he made the Olympic team in the decathlon and pentathlon, finishing 16th and 6th respectively...
...And he revels in American and Cambodian history...
...Competing in the 400meter freestyle, I refused Rome 1960: The Olympics to shave, insisting that it That changed the World would have negligible conBy David Maraniss sequences while doing (simon & scHUster, 478 pages, $26.95) irreparable damage to my dignity...
...The Dog Whisperer: In order to get the message across to [your dog], you have to give him your signal of approval virtually the exact moment he sits...
...Then came another war...
...On other sports the book frankly bores...
...Perhaps Brundage was just around too long...
...Speaking would implicate Sichan, his mother, and then the rest...
...Sichan was there...
...If the reader is expecting a comprehensive report of the 1960 Games, he will be disappointed...
...Many sports are reported anecdotally...
...I knew he was avoiding certain triggers of nightmarish memories—I understood...
...ocTobeR 2008 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR 73 record...
...his family was killed, he starved, became deathly ill at times, saw horrors not seen or fully comprehended by modern minds since the Holocaust, when the world said, “Never again...
...If you walk into a room three seconds after your dog has eliminated on the carpet, there’s no use even commenting on it.…As far as he’s concerned, you’re yelling because of what he’s doing at that exact moment— lying quietly on the floor...
...As editor in chief Tyrrell has reported in these pages before, I certainly tried to change the world, at least the world of swimming...
...These factors have had more to do with changing the Games than anything, and Brundage might be more deserving of the idealistic sports fan Maraniss’s admiration than his contempt...
...Maraniss makes much of the Soviet-USA rivalry...
...slope”), fretting instead over how the little people (“somewhat mindless, passive decision makers”) will react to nudges, warning that “choice architects” must understand how to “encourage socially beneficial behavior, and also how to discourage events like the one that occurred in Jonestown...
...Moreover, he does provide information that I either never knew or had forgotten, for instance that my lifelong friend and Indiana University teammate, Mike Troy, carried the American flag at the closing ceremony...
...Brundage might be more deserving of admiration than of contempt...
...I see the potential for a real Obama family bonding experience: The girls can learn to train the pooch while watching Thaler and Sunstein—The Man Whisperers—teach Daddy how to properly train the nation...
...Why the fascination for this Olympics exists escapes me, and I was there as a participant...
...Lord knows, he’s earned it...
...Brundage was a stickler for amateurism...
...I recall some great performances, but what Olympics does not abound with great performances...
...Rivalries have always existed and always will, as witnessed by the current China-USA comparisons, or as we might recollect from the rivalry between the USA and the Nazis in the 1936 Games...
...And you will genuinely like this tall, lean, handsome man with the shy smile, who became a Republican back when it meant “anti-communist,” and who now lives in San Antonio, helps out on friends’ ranches, and wears a big Texas hat...
...Yet he accepted at face value Soviet assurances that their state-supported athletes were amateurs...
...This wonderfully genial and accomplished athlete was a two-time Olympian, a world record holder, and student body president at UCLA...
...But I think he did so only as one might sleepwalk, holding Although he details the killing fields, it is less about them than it is about hope...
...A generation of South African athletes, both black and white, bore the brunt of these impotent policies, much as the 1980 United States and 1984 Soviet teams would when a tough Jimmy Carter and even tougher Leonid Brezhnev would prevent their countries’ teams from participating as an extension of their foreign policies...
...Back in 1912 his simple interpretation of amateurism motivated him to turn in his fellow competitor in the 1912 decathlon, Jim Thorpe, as a professional...
...The images of the athletes (he mostly focuses on track and field) were probably seared deeply into his bright prepubescent mind and created a lifelong interest...
...On track and field Maraniss writes vividly and the book becomes a page-turner...
...A great American story, told by a great American...
...Taking Brundage I n 2004, nbc presenteD a program titleD “1960: The Last Olympics of Innocence,” and in 2008 David Maraniss gives us Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World...
...Lo and behold, mesmerizing dogs isn’t all that different from nudging the human hoi polloi...
...For example, his brother: They were in the same camp, but, because his brother had been a military officer, they had never spoken...
...The 1960 Olympiad was the first in which swimmers shaved their bodies...
...Their main focus is getting a dog after the campaign...
...And here’s The Dog Whisperer: From a dog’s perspective, there is no such thing as a problem behavior...
...He escaped...
...More importantly, on the large issues Maraniss want to take up—politics, race, and Avery Brundage—the author is unpersuasive...
...But usually, much sooner...
...His book, when dealing with corpses, camps, or saying goodbye to his brother and entire family, is more documented than finely written...
...As befits a longtime member of this magazine’s board of directors, I am dubious of change...
...Possibly that is because I figured outside his theme...
...It was better to cooperate, otherwise your death would be long and painful...
...Back to Maraniss...
...The story I wrote about Sichan for the “old” Reader’s Digest rated first in surveys, was published in editions throughout the world, and in all these years has always been found in some anthology or 76 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR ocTobeR 2008 another...
...I qualified first and Reviewed by alan b. somers in doing so set an Olympic alan b. somers, a former American and World record holder, was a Pan American Games champion and member of the 1960 Olympic swimming team...
...The South Africans resisted and were banned from competition in 1964...
...Although he details the killing fields, it is less about them than it is about hope, which was his mother’s—Mae’s—legacy...
Vol. 41 • October 2008 • No. 8
