By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Colors
Why do the Summer Olympic Games seem to come in the nick of time?
I was 13 when the ’68 Games arrived, fresh from seeing assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy play over and on my family’s new color TV set.
Chicago’s Democratic Convention riots. Vietnam’s Tet Offensive and Apollo 8 orbiting the moon came also that year through cathode tubes expressing not monochrome but a spectrum.
From the screen I would flee down wooded ravines to banks of the Wabash River to still myself, much as possible, watching currents. U.S. 52 Bypass cars and trucks rolled north-south overhead and echoed in steel bridge trusses, A fisherman might putz by in a boat, cast a line and his bobber would bob. We’d wave.
In Mexico City, U.S. sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos bowed heads and raised black gloves on the winner’s podium when the National Anthem played, as if asking, “We have represented our nation with honor. Can you do that for us?” “F___ you,” others took it, me at first too then, but not any longer. “Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last!” the late King had said.
American mile prodigy Jim Ryun was upset by Kenyan Kip Keino, whose thinner-air training had served him better. U.S. long jumper Bob Beamon hung in air near forever before touching down 22 inches further than any man had leapt before. Too much, and yet not enough, of everything all seemed possible.
I was 17, about to leave high school, when the ’72 Munich Games appeared on set. On Sept. 5, Palestinian terror group Black September broke into the Israeli athletes’ compound, killed one and took others hostage. Thus began a horrific vigil.
ABC Sports Anchor Jim McKay stayed in the studio 14 straight hours as the Games were suspended and updates trickled in.
At midnight a German official announced all the terrorists and hostages had been freed, a report that proved tragically premature. At 3 a.m. McKay fought to hold his composure apprising the world what had really happened, “They’re all gone.”
Fast forward 52 years to the Paris Games now underway, played against the usual quaternal U.S. Presidential campaign backdrop. Once more apocalypse appears imminent, if it isn’t too late already.
Looking across the Seine on my screen during Saturday’s opening ceremonies seemed oddly familiar and reassuring. I equate human heights and depths to rivers flowing into Lake Michigan: ever coming, ever present, ever passing
Freedom. That’s what France’s, later America’s red, white and blue to me are about..
The ’68 summer came back to me at this weekend’s Saugatuck Venetian Festival. The band Starfarm’s Gibson guitars poised waiting onstage as crowds filed into Coghlin Park Friday. My camera could scarcely start to express our exuberance and sweat.
I chased dinghies around Kal Lake Saturday, much as I had R.J. Peterson’s SS Keewatin on a rainy June day in 2012 — the Games were in London that year — towed away after 50 years from the Douglas Red Dock forever.
On the Seine U.S. flag bearers Lebron James and Coco Gauff, black American athletes, looked over red, white and blue light displays, perhaps sharing King’still-budding dream.
