Just Off Center Stage

By John Skow

They may not be recognizable, but they are equally Olympian

Is it still possible to offend anyone except the ghost of Avery Brundage and a few no-show Iron Curtain sports commissars by announcing the obvious, that the defunct Olympic ideal of amateurism has always been humbug? The prohibition against pros was not high-minded in its origin, it was high-hat: a snobbish social exclusion of riding instructors, fencing masters and the like who sweated for their keep and were considered high-level servants. It was intended to ensure that those who participated in this festival of running and jumping were the sons and daughters of gentlefolk. Other Olympic ideals had more substance, and these endure. But the old leisure-class amateurism is dead. Not buried, unfortunately, because its rules still clutter the Olympic Games, getting in the way of sportsmen trying to make an honest living; just utterly and irredeemably dead.

"I'll be glad when we eliminate the word amateur from this sport," says Joe Douglas, coach of the Santa Monica Track Club and business manager for Superstar Carl Lewis. "It's a sham. If there were true amateurism in track and field, most of the athletes couldn't compete." Douglas should know. Not only can a track-and-field star like his client make as much as $1 million a year from his sport and still be eligible to compete as an "amateur," it is also possible for top-flight athletes known mostly within the sport to make perhaps $100,000, a handsome living.

One source of income for a first-class track-and-field athlete is appearance money. A star of the magnitude of Lewis, Edwin Moses or Mary Decker can ask for and get up to $15,000 a meet just to show up. In Europe, appearance fees are openly paid. In the U.S., the money passes under the table, and officials of the various sports federations that rule on who is and who is not an amateur pretend that the practice does not exist.

It is not only athletes and coaches who are tired of such pointless fakery. "To ignore reality is stupid, and that's what we're doing," says Robert Helmick, a Des Moines lawyer who is a vice president of the U.S.O.C. Helmick also points out, however, that the Olympic definition of amateurism has been broadened enormously over the past 20 years. Broadened indeed; it is as if the definition of a milk cow had expanded to include gray skin, huge floppy ears and a trunk. Since 1980, subsidies and stipends paid out by the U.S.O.C. have doubled, to an impressive figure of $90 million. But important changes had begun earlier. In 1978, as a result of an International Amateur Athletics Federation ruling, U.S. amateurs were permitted to make commercial endorsements if the proceeds were placed in trust funds, to be tapped for training and living expenses. Thus Marathoner Frank Shorter could begin pitching for Canon cameras and Hilton Hotels, Kodak could sign up Moses, Decker and Marathoner Alberto Salazar, and everyone who was anyone in track and field could finally admit to having been on the payroll of somebody's shoe company since high school.

In 1981 a second trust fund was authorized for track-and-field athletes, to hold "other proceeds," including prize money and, presumably, those forbidden appearance payments. Consulting contracts have now been allowed, and since these do not have to be spent on training, travel or living expenses, they amount to outright salary. "We are quite liberal on what we allow as training expenses," concedes an official of the Athletics Congress, the governing body of U.S. track and field. After his amateur career, the athlete gets the whole wad in the trust funds.

A flesh-and-bucks measure of the change is Paul Cummings, the 30-year-old distance runner who won the 10,000-meter race at the Olympic trials in Los Angeles last month. He had starred in track at Brigham Young University, and when he graduated in 1977 he wanted to continue racing. "But the rules were so strict that you couldn't even coach track at the local high school and remain an amateur," he recalls. "So I quit running, dropped thoughts of coaching and went to work in a steel plant."

This seems to be what the inventors of Olympic amateurism had in mind. No steelworkers need apply. But in 1981 Cummings got laid off from his mill job, "and that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, as it turned out." The rules on amateurism had loosened in the direction of good sense, and Cummings went back to running. Today, he says, "there are marathon races with million-dollar budgets and first-prize money up in the $40,000 range. Now you can make good money as a consultant. That doesn't diminish the joy of competing. But it's made it possible for me to continue in it and earn a decent living for my wife and four children. What's wrong with that?"

What is wrong, a considerable number of penniless athletes might answer, is that among U.S. team members at the Olympics, the new prosperity applies almost exclusively to competitors in track and field.

There are beginning to be some exceptions; the men's and women's bi cycling teams, for instance, are now receiving useful amounts from such sponsors as 7-Eleven and Raleigh bicycles. Boxing is a reliable source of medals, and some months ago the U.S.O.C. began to keep its boxers, many of them impoverished black youngsters with no way of support ing themselves while training, in almost permanent residence at the Amateur Boxing Federation training camp in Colorado Springs, Colo.

But many athletes are pursuing the less heralded laurels whose publicity or retail value is low. For these contestants, something of the imagined amateur purity necessarily survives. Here is a selection from the U.S. Their years of anonymous, isolated commitment will not lead even to a medal in some cases. But they have won their moment on the Olympic stage and a chance for personal satisfaction and glory no less than what Carl Lewis or Mary Decker might feel.

There is, among them, even one old-style, Chariots of Fire amateur, the kind with true-blue attitudes and prosperous parents. John Biglow is a lean, powerful, awesomely fit man of 6 ft. 3 in. and 188 Ibs. who rowed stroke on the Yale crew. After gradation in 1980, he went back to his home in Bellevue, Wash., to talk things over with his father, Attorney Lucius H. Biglow Jr. "I think he was asking, Was rowing a respectable thing to do?" recalls the elder Biglow. His father gave his approval, but that was not all that John Biglow had been asking, of course. He needed financial backing, and he got it. He has been supported largely by his family since then.

Beginning in 1981, when he switched from eight-and four-man shells to single sculling, he has lived near Boston, trained six days a week, much of the time under Harvard Coach Harry Parker, and taken enough classes to qualify for Dartmouth Medical School in the fall. He has held no full-time paying job. Thus he has been a member of the leisure class, though with little leisure. Oarsmen row all year, on the water or on machines, and put in additional long hours running and lifting weights. "You can't have much of a social life," Biglow says. "Oarsmen are notorious for going to sleep at 10 o'clock."

Although he is counted as a good prospect for a bronze medal, he is convincing when he says that competing, not winning, is his reward. Merely to be in the same race with the great Finnish sculler Pertti Karppinen, gold medalist in 1980 and the favorite this year, justifies all the training, says Biglow. Athletics for money, as a business? Biglow finds the concept distasteful. But, he knows, his case is special.

The more modern predicaments are "those of the poor relations on the U.S. Olympic team, competitors like Rick McKinney, 30, of Glendale, Ariz., and one of the best archers in the world. He has won the world championship twice and the national championship six times. If McKinney should develop a finger blister, the U.S. also has Darrell Pace, 27, of Hamilton, Ohio, Olympic trials winner, seven times national champion and the Olympic gold medal winner in 1976. Last year Pace seemed to have tied McKinney for the world championship, only to see one of his arrows hit another arrow in the bull's-eye and glance off into the nine ring. To have McKinney and Pace side by side on the U.S. team is like sneaking two Boston Celtics disguised as college boys into the basketball competition.

The applause is not the kind the Celtics get, however. The U.S. is accustomed to winning the archery gold--John Williams, who coaches the U.S. team, won in 1972--but the fact is that archery is a "that's nice" sport. The shooters look nice in their dress whites, and the medals are nice, but no one gets excited. The result, says McKinney, a small lean man, is that "we're a poor sport." The U.S.O.C. contributes $750 or so a year to each of its top archers, but bows are expensive high-tech affairs with elaborate stabilizers and sophisticated aiming sights, and $750 is the cost of one of them.

McKinney lives, he says amiably, by being "a kept man." His fiancee, Sheri Rhodes, is the archery coach at Arizona State, where McKinney is an unsalaried assistant coach. He says that he may eventually do more studying at Arizona State, concentrating on sports medicine and psychology. In the meantime, money obviously is not a great motivation and, surprisingly, in his analysis winning is not either. He takes what he calls "a Zenistic view." A single well-executed shot is what stirs him. "You have to be psyched up, yet calm and as motionless as possible. Timing is vital. You shoot between heartbeats. My heartbeat throws my aim clear off the target. Then you have to read the wind. That's the worst four-letter word in archery. With all those variables to consider and compensate for, an excellent shot is a great reward."

McKinney is not the only one with a shot at the gold in a sport his countrymen forget about between Olympics. Kevin Winter is a cheerful, wide fellow, 5 ft. 10 1/2 in. tall and 198 Ibs. heavy, tops, who figures that he has an excellent chance for gold in the 90-kg weight-lifting event. Winter is quick to add that although he was the nation's best lifter, pound for pound, at the May trials in Las Vegas, he would not be a medal prospect if the Soviet-bloc countries were coming. "Maybe a few American medals will help revive interest in the sport in the U.S.," he says wistfully. "It's been pretty depressed lately."

Carrying the financial weight of his sport has not been easy. Winter, who lives in San Jose, Calif., calculates that it costs him about $10,000 a year to train. He has a half-time job, with full-time pay, at the First Interstate Bank, a major Olympic team sponsor. In effect, the bank is giving him a generous half-salary subsidy. Even so, he and his wife Gloria, who works at a state unemployment office, go in the hole about $200 a month for his training costs. There is no money in endorsing weights or lifting suits. Amino acids cost $22 a jar, and Winter fortifies himself with a jar every four days. "But the Olympic Committee has asked for my Social Security number," he says, "so perhaps there will be some help up the road." Or, daydreams this chocoholic, maybe Nestle will come calling with an endorsement offer.

Winter is not griping. He is in love with his sport. He may as well stay with amateur lifting, since there is no pro tour to join. "A few guys can go on and make a little money lifting women or logs or refrigerators," he says, "but that's show business." He figures he can add an extra 10 kilos of useful beef and compete at the 100-kg weight. In the meantime, he believes that "negative emotions, like greed or hate, can adversely affect performance, while positive ones, like love or generosity, can improve it." To be calm and controlled, he says, "sends beneficial chemicals to the brain." And helps mightily in forgetting a skinny bank balance.

Do all successful athletes have some kind of sermonette they preach to themselves to get those beneficial chemicals fizzing? Of course they do. Has anyone heard a built-in dial-a-psych like Mike Storm's? Not recently. Storm is a 24-year-old pentathlete from North Arlington, Va., who lives in San Antonio because that is the site of the nation's only pentathlon training center, run by the Army at Fort Sam Houston. Money is no problem; a group of U.S. business men interested in the pentathlon underwrites his training expenses generously enough -- about $1,200 a month -- so that he can fly to competitions in Europe. It is easy to see why Storm caught their attention.

Talking about his sport, or sports, he sounds as if he is success fully trying to get himself to sign on the dotted line: "One of my first trainers told me that the man who wins the medal in the pentathlon is the finest athlete in the world. That has inspired me ever since. My God, the pentathlon is the ultimate competition. Not in any other competition do you find such diversity. The decathlon is all track-and-field-related, but in the pentathlon you're fencing, riding, swimming, running, shooting. Not only does it require power, speed, strategy and the ability to endure pain, but it also requires tremendous mental control. In a sense, the modern pentathlon is the greatest training you can do in life."

This blond and blue-eyed muscular young man says that he made up his mind to be an Olympian when he was seven, competing first as a swimmer, then moving to the bewitching variety of the pentathlon at 14. He visited the San Antonio training center that year, and returned summers during high school and his 4 1/2 years at the University of Pennsylvania (where, while putting himself through a ferocious training regime, he also studied economics, political science and financial management). His extraordinary motivation is an asset in a sport whose audiences generally consist of coaches and a few patient relatives. "Am I sacrificing something by doing this?" he asks. "No. Those people in the private sector are the ones missing out. They will never know what it is like to stand in the Olympic arena, see the flag raised and ..." Will he get a medal? He is given only a slight chance. But whatever the outcome, Storm has no regrets. "Values are permanent. Discipline is permanent. Personal growth is permanent. I know that whatever I'm doing 80 years from now, I'll be doing it right."

When Storm is 104, the typical fencer that age will still be taking lessons from his coaches. Or so say the fencers; their sport is passionate, intensely personal, a fierce relationship between eternal mentors and lifelong learners. At 22, Jana Angelakis, the youngest member of the five-woman U.S. foil team, is ranked No. 2. She is studying with her third coach, a Soviet named Emmanuil Kaidanov who coaches the men's team at Penn State, where she is enrolled on a full athletic scholarship. Kaidanov, she says, is teaching her the why of fencing. "Mine has always been a mental game, as fencing has to be, but I've never been as conscious as I am now. My weapon," she says with satisfaction, "is penetrating the target more accurately."

Angelakis, a strongly built 5-ft. 4-in. duelist with cropped brown hair, has been a star almost since she took up fencing at the age of twelve in Peabody, Mass. She is agile, very fast, and has a lot of what fencers call, admiringly, "stealth," an ability to strike with strategic deceptiveness. She is very determined and temperamental enough to berate officials who make calls against her. But she has never gone beyond the semifinals in an international competition, and although she counts herself a good prospect for an Olympic medal, the form sheet suggests that fencing is still an Old World sport. The best women who will compete at Los Angeles are the Rumanians, Italians, French and, now, the Chinese. (The missing Bulgarians and Soviets would also have dominated.)

In the U.S., fencing is still something to restrain sheep, and fencers are still at the stage of scrambling for subsistence money, recognition and enough new talent to broaden the sport's base. In non-Olympic years, the U.S. fencers who go to meets are not always the country's best; sometimes they are simply the best of those who can afford the trip. Before Angelakis made the 1980 team, her travels were financed for a year with $3,000 raised by the Greek Orthodox Church of Peabody. The odds are that the U.S. is not yet able to produce an international fencing star, but Angelakis does not believe the odds. She thinks the nation is ready for an attractive fencing personality. And she has just the person in mind.

The four-member U.S. women's flat-water kayak team, another "disorganized band of people committed to an offbeat sport," as one of them puts it, also has a clear commitment: to get past a 20-year soggy patch in which the U.S. has won no kayaking medals at all. Not many people in the country know or care about their crusade, and that seems to be just fine with the kayakers. "I think we're tougher than a Mary Decker," says Ann Turner, 27, a tall, striking blond who is the veteran of the crew. "We've had to make all our own arrangements, find a trainer, call the airlines."

Illinois-born Turner, who lives in Stockholm with her Swedish boyfriend when she is not training, has been a kayak gypsy since she was 17. "It takes six to eight years to get really good," she says. She made the Olympic teams in 1976 and '80, supporting herself by lifeguarding, teaching school and selling handmade sweaters and caps. Every dollar and krona she has earned, she says, has gone into kayaking; "I've never bought a stereo or a car."

She is regarded as a pioneer by the other paddlers: Sheila Conover, 21, a Californian and sometime student at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., the most gifted natural athlete on the squad; Shirley Dery, 22, born in the U.S. of Hungarian parents, who trained until last year with the powerful Hungarian team; and Leslie Klein, 29, from Concord, Mass., another kayak gypsy who converted from white-water kayaking. Klein spent years "living out of a car in soaking wet clothes, eating gritty oatmeal." Her life is somewhat more conventional now; she is married to J.T. Kearney, a phys-ed professor at the University of Kentucky, who took a sabbatical to train for the men's kayak team, failed to win a place, and volunteered to be the women's team manager.

What they do is not well understood. "Oh, did you paddle today?" asks a passerby. Every day (except Thursday afternoon and Sunday) is the same when they train together, as they did for five weeks this spring at Lake Placid: up at 6:45 for a two-mile run, breakfast, an hour and a half on the water, lunch, rest, a speed hike or a weight-lifting session, an additional hour of paddling, and dinner. "We've all grown really close," says Conover of the team, and that should help with the four-person competition, new to the Olympics this year. But singles and doubles races remain the traditional events, and the four spend most of their time apart, training for those. Singles training--long days and months of gutting it out alone without teammates or coach--is the reality for all of the women. "Sometimes it bothers me when I see my friends who have homes and babies," says Turner. Klein too accepts that she is different from her friends: "I'm not really sure they understand why I do what I do."

So there still are amateur athletes, high on purity and protein and low on funds, like the splendidly mixed group just encountered. Carl Lewis, who drives a BMW he earned by running and jumping, is not an amateur by any sane definition, but Ann Turner, carless and couldn't-care-less, really is one. Whimsical market forces have replaced most of the snobbish old social exclusion. Lewis gets the BMW, and Turner walks to practice because track and field is more popular than kayaking.

The disparity prompts notice, discussion, opinions. Should the U.S.O.C., or some indulgent megacorp, buy Turner and the other kayakers a car? Well, no, that is not the point. "The whole Olympic idea is in danger of losing the support of the people," argues U.S.O.C. President William Simon. He has bombarded the International Olympic Committee with his strong views on easing restrictions, and, he says, he has been "summarily ignored. Nothing has happened. There's so much hypocrisy. Take tennis, a demonstration sport this year. Eligibility is by age. That means Jimmy Arias, who made more than $1 million playing tennis last year, qualifies because he's under 21, while a true amateur by N.C.A.A. standards could be excluded simply because he's too old. It's ridiculous." No less ridiculous, Wide Receivers Willie Gault and Renaldo Nehemiah, world-class trackmen who unsuccessfully sued to be allowed to compete in the Games, are considered somehow contaminated for foot races against the amateur Lewises because they earn their livings playing football.

The desirable direction, toward a more open Olympics, is obvious. But the answers are not all the same for every situation. Should existing programs to identify talent in "emerging sports" be beefed up? Yes, but not against the national grain; there seems to be no good reason, for instance, to push men's field hockey, a good sport unloved here. Should the Celtics be allowed to play basketball in an open Olympics? That is easy: no. Major leaguers in basketball, hockey and soccer should be excluded. It is widely assumed that the 1988 Games will be much less restrictive, but with the many committees in various sports that set the rules with the I.O.C. and with the advantage that Communist countries derive from the present structure, it is likely that problems will persist. Arguing about amateurism will still be part of the Seoul Games. Happily, so will athletes who rise above mean circumstance to sublime accomplishment.

--ByJohn Skow.

Reported by Lee Griggs/Los Angeles and D. Blake Hallanan/Lake Placid, with other bureaus

With reporting by Lee Griggs/Los Angeles, D. Blake Hallanan/Lake Placid, other bureaus