McKay’s Olympics thing of past

The death of the great Jim McKay has been accompanied by enough black-and-white film and grainy color footage to make anyone not born before, say, 1970, feel as if they might have been, at least for this week.

It is both a sad and glorious irony that in death, McKay has never been more alive for today’s American sports audience. He and his world of sports, wide as it was, have come back to us this week with a refreshing vigor. This is especially true of the Olympic Games, with which McKay was most associated from 1972 onward, and which, through his eyes, have never looked better.

Or more different. Watch the highlights of McKay narrating the end of the decathlon in darkness at the 1968 Mexico City Games, or announcing the tragic deaths of the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich in 1972, or describing the escalating national joy over the U.S. hockey team’s upset of the Soviets at Lake Placid in 1980, and you can’t help but feel that today’s Olympic Games are not those Olympic Games.

So, did the Olympics – or at least those Olympics – die with him?

There was a uniqueness to the Olympics in McKay’s era that does not – that cannot – exist today. Oversaturation and professionalism have made it so.

Back in the 1970s, when families tuned into those Games, it was one of the rare opportunities they had to view a live event from another country as it happened. And they ran to their TV to see it, because if they missed it, it was gone forever. There was no taping or TiVo. They committed their evening to it, and because there were only three or four channels to choose from on the TV dial, they did so willingly. It was the best entertainment they could possibly imagine.

Their effort was repaid tenfold because of what they saw. Namely, sports they had never seen before played by people they would never see again. That was the truly great thing about Olympians back then, and occasionally, even now: They never overstayed their welcome. They dropped into our lives for 16 days, then left, voluntarily.

For an Olympian trying to make a living in sports, this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. But for a sports marketplace quickly filling up with the overpaid and the under-disciplined, it was a breath of fresh air.

These were McKay’s athletes, and he told their stories better than anyone else ever did. They became quite a team: McKay, and those charming Olympic Games.

Inevitably, the pairing didn’t last. Some changes occurred before McKay’s eyes, chief among them the terrorist assault on the Israelis 36 years ago. If the Olympics were just a sporting event then, they certainly never would be again. Security that we have come to know at American stadiums since Sept. 11 has been commonplace since 1976 at the Olympics. The Games are the largest peacetime gathering of the world, as McKay noted a time or two, and it now takes a massive security effort to try to keep them that way.

But much of the change in the Olympic world has come along since McKay anchored his last Olympics in Calgary in 1988. Steroids, scandals, greed, the fall of the Eastern bloc and the rise of the Chinese on the eve of the politically charged Beijing Games – it’s all there, giving the Olympics a harder edge.

Even logical decisions, such as allowing NBA and WNBA players and pro tennis stars into the Olympics to attract the world’s best athletes, have created a less-than-compelling sameness for the Games. That basketball player on TV now? There he or she is again at the Olympics. You see a tennis player at Wimbledon, you see him or her a few weeks later in Beijing. How does an increasingly distracted audience judge the difference?

And those quirky sports that used to pop up only at the Olympics? They probably have their own channel now, or at least three dozen Web sites.

McKay’s Olympics these are not. Yet, for better or worse, these are the Olympics we now have. In sports like swimming and gymnastics, most athletes still train for years with no guarantee of financial reward. They don’t get signing bonuses. They never hold out.

In the 21st century, you might call this too good to be true. Jim McKay would still call it the Olympics.