The Games of Munich

It is a little hard to keep this in focus, but the problem that everyone in Munich worried about before the Olympics was whether the swooping Plexiglas tent that covered part of the big stadium would trap the sun's heat, poach the athletes and turn the plastic running track to peanut butter. The possibility was raised in the local press that the nation's lovingly prepared Olympic games might in this way become a laughingstock, a disaster.

The concern may have been justified, and at some future track meet or soccer game, everything at ground level in the stadium may turn brown at the edges and start to smoke. It didn't happen during the Olympics, however. The weather was nearly perfect, shading to cool late in the afternoons, so that the high jumpers and long jumpers, whose events drowse on into early evening, spent a lot of time putting on and taking off their warm-up pants. Rain held off until after the marathon, on the last day, and then did nothing more than soak a few soccer players. The gentle Bavarian climate gave the games what used to be called Kaiser weather, then Führer weather, and now was called Olympic weather.

Most visitors, I suspect, found themselves listening now and then for echoes of the Nazi regime, but the Germans themselves were in no mood to hear those echoes, and they took great care to muffle them. The games were to be heiter---bright, cheerful, untroubled. Mostly, in matters the Germans could control, they were heiter. Big floppy banners in unmenacing pastel colors floated above the streets of Munich and the Olympic park. The stage settings of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin had been boastful and imposing; but the architecture of the 1972 games was as light and whimsical as anything seen in this part of the world since the time of Ludwig, the Mad King of Bavaria.

Now and then, of course, the past reached out and tapped the viewer on the shoulder. A few yards away from the stadium there is a big grass-covered mound, perhaps 200 feet high. During the games it was jammed 12 hours a day with ticketless sight-seers peering down at the figures on the playing field. I toured the Olympic park a few days before the games with a German photographer I had met and he asked me if I knew what the mound was made of. I said that I had heard it was war rubble from the Schwabing district. "Leichen," he said, grinning. "Lauter Leitchen." Bodies. The grin, depending on how one cared to interpret it, was either a vestige of Schadenfreude---the insane joy of destruction that is supposed to be part of the Teutonic character---or simple journalistic cynicism. American bombs, after all, had produced the Leichen, and here we two were, very palsy.

Edginess aside, however, Munich successfully made the point during the first days of the games that Germans once more were just as civilized as anyone else. The last days of the games may have proved that no one is civilized, but never mind, Germany is as prosperous and paunchy as it is said to be, and a good deal more cheerful. Its army is a halfhearted joke, and that's fine with its supposedly militaristic citizens; serious armies cost too much and sometimes shoot people. Germans who think about Hitler at all are likely to say judiciously that he was talented but a maniac. Openly expressed anti-Jewish feeling has subsided to roughly the level tolerated among older members of the Chevy Chase Club. World War Two is over.

• • •

A central oddity of the Olympiad was the multiple paradox that (1) it was a spectacle that by reason of its size was mostly unattendable and therefore mostly unwatchable; nevertheless, (2) it was overrun by solemn legions of highly skilled professional watchers, who sifted computer print-outs, cathode-tube emissions and sometimes actual athletic events for details, but who (3) by their own huge numbers seriously inhibited whatever fine-scale observation might otherwise have been possible.

There were, we were told, 4000 of us, journalists of one description or another. Each of us was trying, singly or as a member of a pack, to deal with contests and related alarums held simultaneously at different locations in Munich as well as at the main Olympic park, and also in several other cities across Germany. What is usually thought of as "coverage" was, of course, impossible. Not only did the mightiest efforts fall ridiculously short (ABC Television broadcast about 65 of the approximately 1500 hours of world-class competition) but even a gesture at thoroughness would have blown the fuses of any conceivable viewer or reader. Who had the Sitzfleisch to watch 65 hours of televised foot races? The best reportorial plan, obviously, was to wander about planless, picking fruit from the overhanging branches.

Of the 4000 tagged and certified newsmen, approximately 3997 wanted private interviews with Mark Spitz. (The exceptions were two operatives from Tass and myself. I had heard Spitz do his wooden-Indian imitation at a press conference, and the Russians had their own reasons.)

Everyone wanted to watch Olga Korbut, the tiny Russian gymnast, perform on the balance beam, and everyone wanted to watch the Russians play the U. S. team in the basketball finals. The arenas in which these wonders occurred were small, press tickets were rationed, and the only reason riots were avoided was that the clever Germans had built the Olympic press headquarters on the principle of a fish trap. This lavish building was easy to get into but, because of its luxury, very difficult to get out of.

At any given moment for 17 days, a visitor could count on seeing at least half of the press corps becalmed there, drinking, eating, complaining or playing with the fine modern computer information system that blipped out wrong or outdated sports information with astonishing speed. Mostly, however, the news hawks sat stuporous on squashy black Naugahyde sofas, with plastic half-liter containers of Löwenbräu at hand, and watched the Olympics by staring at the banks of color-television sets. A man could cover four events at a time by this method, think well of himself and never move more than 20 feet from the bar.

• • •

The fish trap was the central point of my wanderings in the idle days before the games began. I was living in the center of Munich, in an austere fifth-floor walk-up owned by an Austrian friend of mine, who had used it 20 years before, during his university days. Thinking to get some advice on Munich's night life, I had asked him how he used to spend his time when he wasn't studying. "I would lean out of the window," he had said, in the rich stage-British accent used by educated Austrians when they speak English, "and see how long it took for spit to hit the sidewalk." I tried this and was struck by an unexpected wave of nostalgia. It reminded me of my own college years.

Mornings I boiled water in a corroded teakettle, dissolved some powdered coffee, washed, shaved, cleaned the coffee cup and walked down five flights of waxed, worn wood stairs to the Herzog-Wilhelm-Strasse. A few meters away, in the Kaufingerstrasse, I would buy a copy of the Abendzeitung at the kiosk and two marks' worth of hot sugared almonds from a street vendor, who weighed them out with a chemist's balance and served them in a paper cone.

It was a pleasurably degenerate routine; the Abendzeitung, a yellow sheet that billed itself as "Bavaria's Well-beloved Newspaper," rotted the mind as dependably as the almonds rotted the teeth. Each edition brought news of a fresh Olympic outrage, usually unperceived by the rest of the world's press. One day it was the new "Puff," or whorehouse, that had opened on the Dachauer Strasse near the Olympic park, causing the neighborhood housewives to rise up in wrath.

So inventive was the Abendzeitung that a later scandal seemed almost real for a couple of hours. Mark Spitz wandered to one of his victory ceremonies carrying his sneakers, which happened to be the distinctively striped and heavily promoted Adidas kind, and when he waved at the camera in a vague "Hi, gang" gesture, the shoes happened to be in the hand he waved. The Abendzeitung wasn't having any coincidences where Spitz was concerned, and its writer observed with a splendid display of scornful virtue that Spitz obviously was equally talented in collecting Geld (money) and Gold (his medals). Skier Karl Schranz, whom Avery Brundage had kicked out of the winter Olympics earlier in the year for showing visible means of support, came to Spitz's defense, maybe. Of course Spitz was taking money, said the Lion of St. Anton, and good for him. He, Schranz, supported Spitz every step to the bank.

The International Olympic Committee, on this single occasion unaccountably missing a chance to spill egg on its vest, waved away the accusation against Spitz. But the Abendzeitung was undiscouraged, and the next day, there it was again on the Kaufinger-strasse, leaning against a street lamp and swinging its handbag.

• • •

I would reach the fish trap by 10:30 or 11 a.m., throw out the accumulation of mimeographed misery that had settled in my mailbox overnight, and then review the issues of the day. These might include (in the order of my willingness to think about them) the absurd necklines of the hostess' dirndls, the singular pictographs on the rest-room doors, and the Rhodesian mess.

The Austrian and Bavarian dirndl is the most attractive female costume ever devised. Its low, spinnaker neckline is dizzyingly seductive if the wearer is young, and gracious and beautiful if she is less young. But Germany's Olympic organizers, in a fit of misguided ecumenism, commissioned the French designer Courrèges to create a dirndl for the hostesses, and this malefactor responded with an antiseptic high-necked version that numbed the male soul and caused the hostesses themselves to churn with outrage. It was easily the most treacherous attack in two centuries of Franco-German hostility.

Less calamitous but equally sinister was the matter of the rest-room pictographs. There were pictographs for everything at the games; the stylized figure of a swimmer directed spectators to the pool, a fencer showed where fencing was held, and so on. On the doors of the men's toilets, appropriately, was a standing male figure, back to the viewer, with his hands meeting in front of him at crotch level. What was baffling---at any rate, to me---was the pictograph on the doors of the women's rest rooms: a standing female figure (narrower shoulders, a skirt and slenderer ankles), her back to the viewer, with her hands meeting in front of her at crotch level. My question was, and is, What was this figure supposed to be doing?

The Rhodesian mess was a cheap power play: the successful effort of the black African nations to attack the racist government of Rhodesia by excluding its athletes (an integrated team) from the games. Since Uganda, a principal stirrer up of the trouble, was busy identifying itself as a racist nation by kicking out its Asian residents as brutally as possible, the virtue of the black African position seemed less than self-evident. My own doubts grew mutinously when two sleek, sly and prosperous politicians from the black bloc appeared in the fish trap and boasted in French of their stunt. "A victory for Africa, a victory for sport," said one, and "The future belongs to Africa," said the other. The International Olympic Committee had, of course, caved in to numbers; there were more athletes and more stars on the teams of the African bloc, and among the U. S. blacks who supported it, than there were on the Rhodesian team.

• • •

I skipped the torchlighting ceremony, because parades trigger in my mind a deep instinct for flight, and went mountain climbing in Austria. When I returned, the Rhodesian nastiness had been forgotten, except, I suppose, by the Rhodesians, and the mood of the fish trap and the Olympic village was again heiter. It was the first of several swings of emotion at the games, the last of which were so extreme as to seem schizoid.

For the moment, however, the Rhodesian brackishness was tucked out of sight and the Arab savagery was not yet in view. Mornings at the stadium, while the decathlon high jumpers, say, moved slowly onfield in their sweat clothes, dragging the air mattresses on which they would recline between shots, and trucks turtled along the track off-loading hurdles for a series of heats not scheduled for another hour and a half, there was time to muse about television and the games.

An eyeball viewer has a much better look at the javelin throw than a TV watcher, for instance, because the eyes' binocular vision, wide-angle lenses and better definition pick up the arc of the javelin's flight almost immediately and judge its length and sense. (A javelinist runs, does a couple of prancing steps, sets and heaves, and a pack of them warming up---fierce girls, with floating ponytails---is a brave sight. The viewer imagines Captain Cook being greeted by such a pack before he was eaten.)

Eye and camera are about equally effective for the dashes, but the eye's wide angle catches the spread of the runners far better in the distance events (except for the marathon, which is a mere (continued on page 158)Games of Munich(continued from page 146) curiosity to stadium watchers and superb on TV). The jumping events are better on TV; they need replays and slow motion, although television programing, with its jittery insistence on climax, misses the slowly gathering tensions of the high jump and pole vault as lesser leapers weed themselves out. Swimming is better on TV, with its underwater shots of the turns, and the faceted spin of the gymnastic competitions reflects slightly better through the better light-gathering mechanism, which is the eye.

Paradox flickered through the sleazy interface between image and reality: If, while attending the finals of the discus, you happened to watch Jay Silvester rid himself of his round problem not by turning your face toward Silvester and letting his image waft through the gentle Bavarian air to your eyes but instead checked out his titanic form by looking at the little television set with which all of the better press seats were equipped, could you say that you had watched Silvester in person? As a practical matter, sure you could; what the hell. But the uneasy and half-sentimental notion persisted that the act of eyeball witness marks the viewer in a special way.

During one of the heats of the 10,000-meter run, an event that takes nearly half an hour, I left my stadium seat to get a cup of coffee and a bit of Würstlbrot in the press cafeteria. On my way back, I passed a bank of TV sets. The race, now at its mid-point, had taken on a surprising character. The first four finishers would go on to the finals, and Dave Bedford, the flaky English runner, Emiel Puttemans, the wispy Belgian, and two others had separated themselves from a Russian who was supposed to have a good shot at winning the thing. The four were running as a single machine, and at a very fast pace. This was odd, because the Russian already had died in the dust, and there were no other threats. After a lap or two more, two of the machine's four wheels evidently decided that it was silly to burn themselves out in a heat, and dropped back. But Bedford and Puttemans steamed on side by side, not only running in world-record time but grinning, laughing at each other, throwing words back and forth.

It was wonderfully senseless---running for running's sake---and the people in the stadium began to roar. The roaring set up vibrations in the structure of the stadium, and these came to me not so much through the television set's sound system as through the soles of my feet. This brought to my attention the fact that I was not actually watching the race. Shaking loose from the barb of TV, I ran up a flight of steps, spilling my coffee, in time to see the last laps in living reality.

It was a bit harder to see Bedford's expression; I had to catch the grin by the toss of his head. But now I was enclosed in the same charged space as these two: little Puttemans, who floated on without seeming to touch the track; big, shaggy Bedford, pounding along with his soggy red socks flopping. It was not merely eyeball witness; the molecules of my facial skin and the tensed muscles at the front of my thighs took the print of what was happening. The print is still there. A few yards before the end, still steaming and still laughing, Bedford deliberately held back (so it seemed to me) and let Puttemans have his win, an Olympic-record 27:53.4. As things turned out, Bedford may simply have run out of gas, because he did nothing at all in the finals. Puttemans took second in the 10,000, behind Lasse Viren, a leathery Finn who also won the 5000. The 10,000 final was a remarkable race---Viren fell down and went on to set a world record ---but it didn't mean much to me; I saw it only on television.

• • •

Field hockey causes brown fumes to rise in my brain. So do what the Olympics' organizers call handball (a lame crossbreed of basketball and soccer), volleyball (a fast but mindless game, lacking strategy or variety), wrestling and, I am afraid, soccer (a tough, demanding, brilliantly exciting sport that just does not grab me). Weight lifting was not on the brown-fume list, but only because I had never taken notice of it.

One night, duty-driven and feeling silly, I showed up at the weight hall. Nothing was happening when I arrived. The audience filed in, thick young men in T-shirts, girls in what must be the Western world's last surviving beehive hairdos. The bar bell rested alone on a brightly lit dais, uncommunicative as an idol.

Then the contestants stumped onstage: stubby men of about 5'7" and 148 pounds, the kind who get elbowed in the eye on subways. But these were gladiators; chests huge, thighs and arms knotted like tree roots, bellies swollen from the food necessary to sustain it all.

Shin Hee Won of Korea cinched in his hernia belt and pressed 127.5 kilos without trouble, his thick little arm muscles quivering.

Yusuko Ono of Japan did 130 kilos, his eyes shut with effort. Daniel Cantore of the U.S.A., in white trunks and shirt, glasses and a full mustache, heaved 132.5 kilos to his chest, but couldn't get the weight over his head.

The steel bar bent noticeably when it was heaved, and when the lifter dropped his torment, it bounced five or six times on the rubberized surface of the dais. Wolfgang Faber of East Germany made 132.5 easily. Cantore managed it on his second try. He had one shot left.

It is a concentrated moment. Each man has three minutes to compose himself and heave. He can spend the time as he pleases. Some remain offstage. Others appear, glare, flutter their wrists, ponder. Each man cinches in his bellyband.

Pietro Masala, a German despite the name, elected to start at 137.5. It was his choice. The world record was 155.5 kilos, but he could have started at 200 if he felt strong. Masala failed. He was short, and looked as if he should have been mining emeralds in some Rhenish cave. He stayed onstage. He tried a second time and then a third. He failed, grimaced in misery and shame, and crept off.

Cantore lifted 140 kilos on his last try, apparently without trouble.

Nasrollah Dehnavi of Iran, the strongest-looking man to appear so far, ignored the competition until 142.5 kilos, then lifted this great weight with ease. Mukharbi Kirzhinov of the U.S.S.R. strutted onstage, also for the first time, shoved the same weight into the air with contempt and---flash comes in nuances here---did not drop the bar bell but put it down gently.

Zbiegniew Kaczmarek of Poland took his first try at 145 kilos, an Olympic record. He failed, tried again and made it. Dehnavi shook himself, raised his face toward the lights and lifted 147.5 kilos. Kirzhinov equaled this.

But here came Mladen Koutchev of Bulgaria, who had brooded in his tent till now. He called grandly for 150 kilos and heaved it. Dehnavi matched him desperately on his last try.

Then Koutchev, who is blocky, quick, scornful and may once have had a neck, signaled for 157.5 kilos. It would be a world record. He lifted, heaved, failed and threw the bar off his chest in disgust. Then he stomped away, circled, returned and lifted the thing.

A Japanese businessman sitting next to me turned and in German far better than mine said that this was very impressive. "Kaum zu glauben," I agreed, and left the hall, intent on finding the Brazil-U.S.A. basketball game. I did and was rewarded by seeing the man who, by half a step and a move and a half, was the best player of the Olympics, Brazil's 6'8" forward, Maciel Ubiratan Pereira. An elderly semipro borrowed from the Italian league, he looked like a bald Montezuma, played like the feathered serpent and kept Brazil ahead for most of the game. We won, 61--54, looking talented but ragged.

• • •

Months before, I suppose, someone on the Olympic organizing staff had ordered (continued on page 200)Games Of Munich(continued from page 158) the thing, and now we saw it: a green beach ball, 12 feet in diameter. The authorities had taken it out of its box, pumped it up and rolled it onto the grass behind the swimming hall for the spectators to play with. People pushed it around, got lost under it and laughed.

We walked on, some visitors and I, and stopped to watch a tribe of clowns. One of them was gotten up as a Russian lady weight lifter. She heaved, grunted, made faces. Suddenly her pants fell down and, oops, that was no lady. A bit farther, there was a big tent that served fried chicken and beer, and we took some out to the edge of a big pond and sat on the grass and ate it. The security cops, cheerful unarmed fellows in baby-blue uniforms and white caps, did not hassle us. In fact, it wasn't even illegal to sit on the grass and eat chicken.

We went on to the stadium and there saw a sight not to be believed or repeated: the great old miler Kip Keino of Kenya running the steeplechase for the first time in his Olympic career. This is a galumphing race, with several unbendable hurdles and a big mud puddle, and Keino negotiated these absurdities with the facial expression of a man interrupted during sex. He was no hurdler, but between hurdles he was Keino, and he won, with a new Olympic record of 8:23.64.

For the rest of the afternoon, I fell in love with a succession of girl high jumpers, leggy creatures who languidly removed their sweat pants and then---never mind the jump---bounced in pretty disarray on the huge green mattress that jumpers land on. A Canadian Fosbury-flopper was particularly heartbreaking, and after a good deal of what might be called body English, a discussion arose about whether or not she was wearing a bra. An Amateur Athletic Union official, while pretending to no definite knowledge, said that she wasn't, and an old New Zealand decathlon man said he wasn't going to let go of his binoculars until he made sure, one way or the other. She fouled out before we came to a decision.

• • •

The next morning, a cabdriver began talking excitedly about Geiseln, a word I did not know, and it was a moment before I understood from the rest of his sentence that there were hostages, Israelis, being held by terrorists. One, maybe two Israelis were dead.

There was little for the rest of the day but sourness and futility. Ironies came cheaply. Through a gross lapse of sense and taste, the Olympic authorities allowed competition then in progress to continue, and through the hours of deadlines and ultimatums, one of the TV channels showed manicured fat horses circulating eerily at a dressage exhibition. Death, burst entrails: Picasso's horses. Image and reality again smeared hopelessly together; as police snipers took positions around the Israeli apartment building, German TV announced abruptly that it was breaking off coverage, because the terrorists had television sets. I continued to watch a BBC transmission not available in Germany outside the press headquarters, and realized that by turning my head 45 degrees, I could see, through a window, the house where the Israelis were being held.

There was no satisfactory way to react, professionally or simply as a member of the same race as the hostages and the terrorists. This truth became, for those of us not directly involved, the unswallowable fact of the next few days. For the first time, the ancient, symbolic act of pouring ashes on one's head made sense to me.

I walked to the Olympic village and was turned back at a gate, returned, watched the uninformative TV, drank coffee, made notes. The notes show that I felt that if there were more deaths than the two we knew about, obviously the games should be canceled. Also that I saw the shabby logic of this view, which was founded mainly on my own discomfort; I had accepted and sadly written off the two deaths that now lay in the past, but was not prepared to admit the truth, that I would also sadly accept the nine deaths that might lie in the future. And that, weirdly, distance was a factor; against all sense, I would not have been so violently disturbed if the same hostages had been held by the same terrorists in Frankfurt or Geneva or Tel Aviv.

A grubby curiosity, unimportant except to those who were there, was that at about 11:30 p.m., an hour or so after we had heard helicopters beating through the air above us, we watchers in the fish trap were told that the hostages had been taken to an airport, where they had been freed and the terrorists captured. On the strength of this, I went home to sleep. No one ever explained the error, which fooled the local press, too (the respected Siiddeutsche Zeitung had the false news in English on its back page and the correct report---all nine hostages, five terrorists and one policeman dead---in German on its front page).

In the time it took to ride the subway back to the Olympic park the next morning, I changed my opinion of the day before. I now felt that to cancel the games would be to give anarchy a victory that it should not have. Others I talked with had made the same switch in mood, and at the mourning ceremony in the stadium that day, it was announced that the games would continue. The stands were crowded for this observance, but the seats set out for athletes on the playing field were sparsely filled. No Russian athlete was present, for instance, and far fewer than half of the Americans were there.

In the exhalation of grief, confusion and blame setting that followed, journalists in large numbers began to exhibit a curious tic. In article after article, good reporters would begin to analyze the terror, and then, finding their own responses inadequate, would flee across the thinnest of logical bridges to the certainty of some unrelated fixed idea, carrying their terrible emotion with them. Chris Brasher, an old Olympian writing for the London Observer, short-circuited during an intelligent discussion of the murders and began to thunder about athletes who violated the Olympic ideal by training too hard, thus damaging their health. Shana Alexander lost her nerve halfway through a Newsweek think piece and raved embarrassingly about the "all-important tragic flaw" of the German character; the failure of the police to rescue the hostages, she said, "showed Germans once again incapable of improvising on a plan, which is why they lost two world wars." When it was over, she complained, the Germans couldn't understand their error---"an echo of the days when they didn't know about Dachau, and Dachau was the back yard of Munich."

The ailment was catching. Back in Washington, after observing that the U. S. track coaches had failed to get our world-record sprinters Eddie Hart and Rey Robinson to the starting line, the respected columnist David Broder flipped weirdly to his own unrelated preoccupation: "A blunder is a blunder, whether we are talking about the coaches' slip-ups in Munich or the American intervention in Vietnam."

No one found anything very helpful or hopeful to say. There was much talk of revising the structure of the Olympics by limiting the number of the events, or by splitting the games into several separate meets. Behind this was a sensible but depressing notion: If the barbarians can't be suppressed, reduce the attractiveness of their target. But one of the limiting proposals---to drop all team sports----also had another source. This was the disgust that many of us felt for the Olympiad's childish nationalism.

Nationalistic display was not limited to team events, of course. As always, flags were raised and an anthem played every time somebody won something. Individual events, however, seemed to touch a rather harmless level of nationalism among the spectators. I was pleased when Frank Shorter of the U. S. won the marathon, but rooting for the American runner really had been only a way of being interested in a race whose entry list otherwise meant nothing to me. I was just as happy, and so were other Americans I sat with, when John Akii-Bua of Uganda, a bubbling, happy man, frisked about the track in glee after winning the 400-meter hurdles.

The team sports, on the other hand, regularly tangled us in violent tribal loyalties. The cheering at team events had a harsher tone to it. The mood of most of the athletes---friendly and open in the man-to-man sports, for the most part---seemed darker. The blatant jobbing by which the U. S. basketball team was robbed of its gold medal was fairly clearly an act of tribalism by Easternbloc judges on the review board, and the Americans, affronted in tribal honor, sulkily refused the silver medal. The Pakistani field-hockey team lost in the final to West Germany, went mad in a way that no individual loser was guilty of, and rioted.

It won't do to push this idea too far; obviously, it is possible to play and watch team sports in a way that doesn't involve tribal vengefulness. But the matter of tribalism remained troubling, and a watcher could not help reflecting that tribal mania underlay the bloody central tragedy of the Munich games.

Why, I wondered (deep stuff for a sportswriter, but we were in deep), had civilized society always insisted that loyalty to groups was a virtue? We all understood that loyalty to oneself, egotism, was highly dangerous, and we spent much time teaching our young to keep their individual aggression within safe bounds. But we also taught prideful and reflexive loyalty to religious sects, geopolitical groupings, school football teams and national Olympic squads. These loyalties, ironed in, showed as tribalism: "I pledge allegiance to the flag," "Death to Israel." "Fuck the Pope," "Fight team, fight." It was tribal loyalty, of course, that allowed the terrorists to display proudly a kind of behavior that in a single individual would have been called madness. In their tribe, as official statements by the Arab nations made clear, they were heroes.

One of the failures of the games was the single public protest against tribal fetishism, a spur-of-the-moment reaction that was totally misunderstood by most of the people who saw it. Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett, the two U. S. blacks who had come in one-two in the 400 meters, affronted Western civilization and got themselves spanked and sent home by jiving on the victory platform and refusing to stand at attention when The Star-Spangled Banner was played. The Olympic fathers, of course, went out of their minds with tribal fury, and my European friends, without exception, put the display down to the bad manners of savages. "We stood respectfully to honor them, and they laughed at us," said one of them. It was difficult to explain that the U. S. flag had become to some extent a factional symbol that, if seen on the rear window of a car, for instance, symbolized some fairly specific political attitudes not likely to please an angry black. I thought the inept protest left Matthews and Collett looking silly, but I can't quarrel with their impulse. What should flags have to do with foot racing?

• • •

Memory says that we were cheerful and heiler before the murder of the Israeli hostages, and depressed afterward. But it was not that simple. In my notes, I find a bit of nonsense I wrote down during a basketball game between the Yugoslavs and the Puerto Ricans. "The first-name contest goes to the Yugos," I had scribbled, "but only after a struggle. The Puerto Ricans have Hector, Neftali, Teofilo and Joe, but the Yugos have Ratko, Vinko, Zarko, Dragan, Blagoja, Kresimir, Miroljub, Dragutin and Ranko." This is mildly funny, but only if the notetaker is in a whimsical frame of mind. The date of the note indicates that I was in a whimsical frame of mind four days after the shooting. The entry is followed by a woozy rhapsody in blue ballpoint about a cute, braless basketball usher named Karin, who was 18 and couldn't decide, she said shyly, whether to be a journalist or a teacher. She was a great improvement over the rancid troglodytes who ush at the Knicks' games back home, I noted.

This is enough to make the point, although I am uncertain just what point it is. That we human beings bear up remarkably well under the load of other people's disasters? That we are tough and resilient? That we have a short attention span? That we are insane? These questions were in the Munich air, like fly ash, and we sportswriters were not very good at answering them.

• • •

The last week of the games seemed mostly lawyering. We had lawyered before; after Hart and Robinson, our two never-fail sprinters, failed to show up on time for their heats of the 100 meters because of a mistake by their coach, we lawyered for a second chance and quite correctly did not get it. (This prompts my Modest Proposal for Preserving Amateurism: Pay the athletes, since they can use the money and most of them get paid anyway, by their colleges or their national sport secretariats, but insist that coaches be simon-pure. Who needs professional coaches? Who can argue against the self-evident truth that they constitute a world-wide case of jock itch? For that matter, who needs that assembly of antique gasbags, the International Olympic Committee? Modest Proposal Number Two: Disband the I.O.C. and reconstitute it entirely from retired Olympic athletes whose participation in the games dates back no more than 12 years.)

The East Germans, meanwhile, had lawyered successfully to prevent Bob Seagren of the U. S., the world record holder, from using a vaulting pole that under Olympic rules was perfectly legal. Their man Nordwig won a gold medal that should have been Seagren's, and Seagren, in a gesture that had some class, at the end of the competition disdainfully handed his substitute pole to one of the officials.

Jim Ryun, the moody world-record miler who was supposed to have won the 1500 meters in 1968, but didn't, also was supposed to win this time, and didn't. He ran carelessly at the rear of a pack during one of the 1500 heats and tripped over something, possibly his overcomplicated psyche. He was out. His coaches lawyered but lost. Dave Wottle, who may have no psyche at all, but who has a funny hat and wears it when he runs, wottled through five races and got hopelessly boxed in all of them. He won the 800, nevertheless, turning on a kick that produced an unearthly clanking of parts and scattering of bolts. But he lost out, through vacant-mindedness, in an easy semifinal of the 1500. Peter Snell, the great New Zealand miler and half-miler, who was sitting next to me, said, "He's either bloody thick or superconfident, take your pick."

The final buzzer (the second one) of our basketball melodrama with Russia left us lawyering again, and although we were right, we lost that one, too. We had played badly---an awkward, stand-around kind of game that did not suit our considerable speed and ball-handling skill---against a modestly talented but well-drilled bunch of Soviets. We deserved to lose for our wottling, and were doing so until Doug Collins, a thin 6'6" guard with sunken cheeks and cold eyes, staged a mad-dog finish. With the U. S. behind 48--49 and zilch to go, he drove, got smeared into the basket supports, peeled himself off the floor and sank two foul shots. The Soviets called time as they inbounded, and there was one second left. Their court-length pass failed: We had won. But no, down from the stands, where he had been watching as a private citizen, came an official of the association that controls world amateur basketball. Illegally, he overruled the referee and timekeeper and ordered the ball to be given to the Soviets with an arbitrary three seconds left. The Russians threw the ball in, but the game was stopped again. Now officials claimed the clock had been set back improperly and reset it for three seconds. This time the in-bounds play was perfect, and this time no one started the game over.

• • •

At 11:44 p.m. on September tenth, the day of the track-and-field finals, and the last day but one of the Olympics, a report was phoned into the ABC Television control room that one Russian was thought to be dead and three wounded in the Olympic village. "It's real!" someone yelled. A few seconds before, the A.P. ticker had carried the news that shots had been heard in the village but that no victim or weapon had been found.

It was 16 minutes to air time. Film editors were putting together the last bits of a program of taped highlights of the games, ABC's third show of the day. Almost everyone else was at the Sheraton Hotel in Munich, celebrating the end of a year of work that an ABC staff of more than 300 people had put into the games. Chuck Howard, ABC Sports vice-president in charge of program production, shut his eyes for a moment, then did what was necessary: He made sure that a reporter with a walkie-talkie was on his way to check out the Russians, warned ABC in New York and arranged to have the transmission satellite ready several minutes early, in case the news broke quickly.

At this point, Howard would have helped bury a dead Russian by the dark of the moon to avoid tearing his show apart. He had not had time to scratch his ear since one in the afternoon. For much of the time, he had roosted in the stadium control room, shaping the live coverage as it went into the tube. He monitored some 20 TV screens, choosing shots from German television and ABC's own cameras, decided what taped fragments would fit into the remaining live time, scheduled commercials, directed the technicians in the control room, took direction through a headset from his boss, Roone Arledge, and through a second headset cued his announcer, Jim McKay. (Howard: "Tell them he's six hundred yards ahead...." McKay: "And Frank Shorter maintains his lead of about six hundred yards...." Howard: "He's at kilometer thirty-eight...." McKay: "Running strongly at kilometer thirty-eight...." Howard: "What's difficult about this next stretch?" McKay: "But Shorter's problem now is....")

A balky tape machine in New York prevented a commercial from running on time, and announcer Chris Schenkel had to make a fast oncamera recovery, which he did. Erich Segal, the Love Story author and a marathon buff, had not dried up, as amateurs sometimes do, but had flowed like a faucet.

Howard now had an excellent opportunity to turn a good day into a rotten one. Breaking into the taped show could look very foolish, but missing a major news break in this tense atmosphere would look worse. Howard put off his decision. It was six minutes to air time.

Then Peter Jennings, the man with the walkie-talkie, called to say that the Russians were laughing at him. They claimed that no one was dead. He thought they were on the level.

"Thanks, Peter," said Howard, smiling for the first time in 15 minutes. Had the Russians drilled a defector and hidden the body in a clothes hamper? If so, good luck to them. Howard (who, incidentally, had not seen a single Olympic competition during the games) rolled the taped show, then sagged off to the Sheraton to join the party.

• • •

The night of the closing ceremony was gray and cold, the sort of weather in which generals drink brandy and soldiers wonder whether their boots will last the winter. Old Avery Brundage, big and pink and bareheaded, thanked the citizens of Munich, declared the games closed and called on the youth of the world to reassemble four years later in Montreal.

Should they? Will our tribalism be less rancid in four years? Canada's own Quebec Libre terrorists might be the ones to surface, their hearts burning with righteousness and their insulation smoldering. The U. S. has its own tribal zealots, and the border is unguarded. The Arabs are unlikely to be reconciled, and the bloody nerve ends of the Irish tribes still might be capable of another twitch. Black and white furies could lash each other one more time. But to list such obvious possibilities is to foretell the past. The terrorists of Montreal might be students, but why not the cheated and embittered old? Perhaps the Jesus people will have gone snappish. Cells of romantics might be hunting down scientists. And we will be teaching school children, still, that loyalty to groups is a fine and holy thing.

I don't know. When the athletes swarmed in to listen to Brundage close the games, they danced wildly for half an hour. Relief, maybe. Afterward, I was swept along with them as they surged, laughing, back to the village. I remember thinking that, corpses and flags aside, it had been a good Olympics. But that is meaningless; corpses and flags aside, it has been a good century.

An hour after the torch went out, I found myself in an Italian restaurant with a couple of pretty Austrian Olympic hostesses. The U. S. handball team was there, girlless, full of beer, gloomy. No, the Olympics hadn't been worth it, one of them said; he wouldn't go through that again. Go through what? Whole fucking thing, he said, waving his beer and spilling it. But then the handball team and the hostesses began teasing one another and laughing, and the evening ended as a fair success.

Also meaningless. But I'm tired. Let the Canadians worry about the Montreal Olympics. If they feel rich enough in time, money and bravery to make another try at having a peaceful footrace festival, then it would be a nice, harmless thing to do. If not, I guess that we will burrow deep and try to outwait the barbarians or the ice age or whatever it is that is coming.

Now it is late morning, and I am sitting outside the Café am Horn in the Stachus district of Munich, enjoying a fourth cup of coffee and the muzzy sunlight. I have had enough of sports, assassins, cheering fans, coaches, journalists and my own recent thoughts. The Austrian friend who lent the garret room to me has called to find out how I am. That seems important. The sunlight seems important. The plane I will take to Boston later today seems important. Nothing else seems important. Life, thus carefully narrowed down, seems not only livable, but good.