Here's One Man's Meet

By George Plimpton

Pullaway swimsuits, Ali's magic and the Iron Hammer

With the Games at an end, a noted journalist-athlete, or athlete-journalist, found time to review his insights of a fortnight. Herewith George Plimpton's report:

The trouble with "covering" the Olympics was that 10,000 journalists were doing the same thing. Anyone in Los Angeles with a slightly glazed look for the past two weeks was a writer trying to cook up an original idea. When the country of Burma walked into the Coliseum with a team that consisted of only one member (a boxer named Zaw Latt), 7,000 pencils scribbled on pads that Zaw Latt would make an interesting feature. When George Vecsey of the New York Times wrote a fine story about what he described as the "Burma team" (the Burma team lost its first bout against Christopher Ossai of Nigeria), a great host of writers (including this one) grimaced and chided themselves for not reaching the Burma team first.

Reporters were everywhere. The French left-wing journal Liberation was covering part of the Olympics from a gay bar. The nonprint reporting was equally assertive. To slake its countrymen's curiosity about Los Angeles and life in the fast lane, British television showed naked ladies sitting in hot tubs sipping daiquiris, looked in on a cocaine-snorting party and reported on esoteric appliances like outdoor vacuum cleaners.

Nothing, however inconsequential, seemed to escape the notice of the press. When Carl Lewis grabbed a huge American flag from the stands to run a victory lap with it after winning the 100 meters, the press descended on the spectator whose flag it was. The next day in the Los Angeles Times it was all there--his name (Tucker), where he was from (New Orleans), his age (50), where he was sitting (row 2, section 27) and that he had got his flag back afterward.

Given these circumstances, the common practice for reporters like me was to fill notebooks with details so inconsequential that perhaps one would have stumbled upon an "exclusive" that no one else had thought of. For example:

Early in the Olympics, high up in the temporary bleachers flanking the swimming pool, I found myself sitting beside John Naber, the winner of four gold medals in Montreal in 1976. Across the way on the superstructure of the diving platforms, the women divers were collected on the various levels, chatting among themselves, elegant and lovely, like egrets in a rookery.

"See those little blue towels they're drying themselves off with?" Naber asked. "They're made of chamois. Very absorbent stuff. Divers go through hundreds of towels because they have to be dry for the dry-to-dry contact with hands clasping legs, for example, in certain kinds of spins. Dr. Sammy Lee, who was a two-time gold-medal diver, markets these little towels. Guess what they're called: 'Sammy's Shammies.' " I had my note book out. "Has anyone else asked you about Sammy's Shammies?" Naber looked puzzled. "I don't think so."

"Would you mind keeping that to yourself?" I asked.

He shrugged. We stared at the divers lounging against the platform rails.

"Very gregarious bunch, divers," Naber was saying. "Far more social breed than swimmers."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Swimmers don't have anyone to commune with except themselves," Naber said. "Nothing but the rush of water by their ears, hour after hour in practice. Many of them sing to themselves to pass the time. I used to hum Smoke on the Water. Divers, on the other hand, stand around in the open air. They preen a lot, very conscious of their bodies because they're judged on their looks. They're like high-fashion models. They spend a lot of time gabbing at each other in Jacuzzis."

Naber turned to me. "Why are you so excited about Sammy's Shammies?" he asked suddenly.

I told him of my difficulties. "I don't know where to go," I said. "Everyone you trip over is a reporter from the Sequoia Newsbreak."

"Let me give you a hand," Naber said sympathetically. "I'll tell you the place to watch women's diving from, and that's from the underwater portholes with the camera crews. Very privileged place. Especially off the 10-meter board. The girls tend to have what we call pullaways. Their suits can't take the stress of coming into the water at that velocity. We never get complete pullaways, but certainly dramatic enough for the camera people. I could possibly get you in there."

"Well, that's very kind of you."

"The trouble is that there are no portholes in the Olympic diving pool."

"Oh."

"The underwater shots will be taken by a scuba diver. Portholes were built for the swimming pool--$150,000 it cost. They didn't bother about the diving pool."

I said that it seemed to me that someone had picked the wrong pool.

"It would have cost about a quarter-million dollars," Naber explained. "You can buy an awful lot of scuba divers for that amount of money."

I told Naber I was going below the stands to see if I could interview a scuba diver. "You may have put me on to something," I said.

The bleachers rose up on either side of the pool on a forest of slender poles. Two young attendants were on station to keep people from passing under. "You haven't seen a scuba diver come through here?" I asked. It was a few days before the diving competition. The attendants looked bewildered. "Could you let me know if you see one?" I asked.

Behind them there was a crash. A shoe had fallen from between the cracks of the temporary stands high above.

"Do you get much of that?" I asked.

The two said there was a steady deluge of objects that fell down between the seats-flags, camera caps, paper cups, hats, seat cushions--tumbling down to the litter at ground level. I asked what some of the more interesting objects had been. I had my notebook out.

Well, they'd had a thermos bottle and a Visa card. "The Visa card was a surprise," I was told. "Why do you suppose the person up there had his Visa card out?"

"Do the spectators come down to retrieve what they've dropped?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Especially those who drop film rolls. They're wild to get them back."

One of the attendants said, "The time to come by here is when the swimming meet is over, the stands have emptied and the sweepers are up there clearing the seats with their brooms. Wow!" he said. "There's a really big ... well, Niagara of stuff coming down."

"What time does this go on?" I asked in a lowered voice.

"Around 1 o'clock. And then we have another show around 7 p.m."

"Does anyone else turn up to watch--any other reporters? Or anyone who looks like a reporter?"

They didn't think so.

I climbed back up to my seat. I told Naber I thought I was on to something. I described the litter. He said it was the most inconsequential thing he had heard of yet, but he would keep his eyes open. "I'm good at this sort of thing," he said. He had once discovered $4.79 in the drain of his high school swimming pool.

Next I went to see Muhammad Ali in his West Hollywood mansion with the wide manicured lawns and the tall white flagpole. He was always worth a story. Perhaps he would tell me the one about his Olympic gold medal, how he had taken it from his neck after being refused service in a Louisville restaurant for being black and had thrown it with its bright ribbon twirling off a bridge into the Ohio River.

He was seated behind a massive desk, laboriously attacking his mail with a foot-long brass letter opener. He told me that now he wishes he had the gold medal. "Everything's changed. I could buy the restaurant now." Slowly he mentioned the names of some of those responsible for the success of the civil rights movement in their various contradictory ways: Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace, Robert Kennedy, Lester Maddox . . . The voice was muffled and much thicker than one had prayed. He spoke as if he had a handkerchief in his mouth. I suggested that maybe throwing the Olympic medal off the bridge had helped in that cause too? He did not comment.

"I was standing by to light the Olympic flame," he told me, "in case they chose me." Abdel Kaber, the Moroccan aide who has been with him recently, whispered that the champ had not even been invited to the opening ceremonies. Phone calls were made on his behalf, but it was too late. Nothing could be done, apparently.

Ali hauled out a fishing-tackle box that contained his magic tricks. That is his ritual these days. He waved a black wand. At his cry of "Hah!" it turned into a red flag. "Pretty good?" A white cone snapped into life as a handkerchief. Balls appeared and vanished. A dime disappeared into a penny.

There were more tricks, very often the same one over again. After he had performed a trick three times, Ali showed how it worked. He is not supposed to do this--very much against the magicians' code. He has been dropped from the Magic Castle, the official magicians' club. Ali pulled off a fake thumb. He explained: "It is a sin in my religion to deceive people." He has almost as much fun explaining the tricks as he has doing them.

Ali walked out into the hall. He was carrying the black wand. He went "Hah!" and it changed into a red flag. There was someone watching from the next room. A reporter wearing sandals was sitting there. He had a big note pad. As I left the mansion, a car drove up, three men got out. One of them was a photographer.

The next morning John Naber called.

"I have a report. A child's purse with a plastic Chap Stick. A lady's shoe. A baby rattle. Sunglasses. A telephoto lens. All found under the swimming bleachers. Went around to see to it myself."

"Sterling work," I said.

"But have you read the Los Angeles Times this morning? A reporter has got to the Coliseum's lost and found. It says in the paper that a 40-year-old man came there to report that he'd lost his mother. So they sent out and found her for him. Then after an hour or so he was back. He'd lost his camera."

"John," I said, "we've got to work harder."

A great chance! The opportunity has come up to talk to four Chinese gold medalists--Wu Xiaoxuan, the winner of the small-bore three-position rifle competition; Li Ning, the great gymnast; Luan Jujie, who won a gold medal in fencing; and Lang Ping, the spiker on the women's gold-medal volleyball team who is known as the "Iron Hammer."

Our host was Ying Ruocheng, the actor who played Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in Peking. A popular actor in China, he speaks perfect English. He had arranged things.

We had our interview in the student lounge of Hedrick Hall. The Chinese wanted to talk about American television. They are extremely critical of the advertising. They liked the Kodak commercial with the children playing at Olympic games, the little kid in a black leotard lifting up a barbell, but they don't understand why such things overwhelm the screen time. At one point it was explained that during close-up shots U.S. athletes often would use the opportunity to wave happily at friends watching at home and say things like "Hi Mom!" Was there any such tradition in China?

The athletes looked puzzled. Mr. Ying's translation took a long time.

Finally Li Ning said that when a television camera approaches him, he feels tense. He was not sure that he could express himself to his friends or family at such times.

Mr. Ying's colorful translation was that the Chinese still needed training and experience in the "Hi Mom" department. I wanted to ask what the Chinese thought of the television advertisement of the ape climbing the building and the girl in the nightgown stomping her foot and shouting at him, "Hey, you big ape, who's going to pay for this mess?" But the conversation swung around to what the four athletes were planning to take home as gifts.

The rifle medalist said she had bought a Walkman. Li Ning said he was going to buy a doll... for his younger sister. Giggles from around the circle. The Iron Hammer said, "We hope it's for your younger sister."

Li Ning nodded, a bit embarrassed perhaps; then he said in perfect English, "I'm sure."

Mr. Ying said admiringly, "Li Ning has very good pronunciation, as you can hear, but he says he doesn't know what he's saying."

Li Ning continued (in Chinese) that he had packed half a suitcase to leave room for presents but now it was full of gold.

More laughter. What were they going to do with their gold medals once they got home? Li Ning said he would not hang his on the wall because people were too jealous. He thought he would take a photograph of the medals and hang that, and put the medals themselves in a strongbox.

The Iron Hammer, with a grin, said she was going to wait for a rainy day and then sell hers.

Mr. Ying hurriedly explained, "The Iron Hammer comes from Peking. They have a strange sense of humor in Peking."

Li Ning said he had stared at his gold medals until he thought he was going to go colorblind. The other three nodded.

I asked about the sporting press in China. Was it as large and persistent as it was in the U.S.? Oh, yes, they agreed. In fact, more so. The Chinese reporters were far more dogged. A reporter would tail you for a whole day, maybe more. Li Ning said he felt reporters were sometimes very desperate. Especially Olympic reporters. It was easier to be a gymnast. --