I was walking through the living room in my Sea Isle beach house last Friday when my entire family – wife, son, in-laws and grandkids – invited me to pull up a chair and watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games.
“Not a chance,” I said. “I hate the Olympics.”
Huh? Who hates the Olympics? For centuries, this sports spectacle has been iconic, gathering the best amateur (and not-so-amateur) athletes together in a global display of pomp, pagentry and patriotism.
The truth is, since 1988, I have rarely paid any attention to the biannual events because I got to see, up close, just how corrupt and heartless they really are.
The Olympics are where dreams are made, you say? Michael Phelps, Mary Lou Retton, Bruce Jenner (now Caitlyn), Simone Biles, Muhammad Ali. . . . the list of heroes is endless.
Unfortunately, the other side of the extravaganza – the part rarely on display during this glorified TV show – is the cruel and ruthless exploitation of so many of the athletes, the utter disregard for the countless dreams crushed by an unconscionable bureaucracy.
My first suspicion that the Olympics were a disgrace came in 1972, when the Russian basketball team basically was given a couple of do-overs in the final seconds of the gold-medal game in West Germany until it finally defeated the Americans. A bogus timeout and a clock malfunction handed the USSR the extra chances, but surely an appeal would restore the gold to the US.
Sorry, the appeals board had three members of the Communist Bloc on the five-member committee. Appeal denied.
Goodbye, gold medal. Goodbye, dreams.
In the ensuing years, there was blatant favoritism on all sports that required judging, especially figure skating, but the TV broadcast never highlighted the injustices because, after all, that wasn’t what it was selling.
Back then, ABC was getting Up Close and Personal, telling wonderful stories of how young athletes pursued their dreams of standing on that podium, gold medal draped from their necks, while their national anthem played.
It was all so beautiful, and so selective, in its storytelling.
Then came my final reality check on this nauseating athletic tradition, when I was assigned to cover the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was my even greater misfortune to receive as my main assignments two of the sports where the corruption was most rampant, women’s gymnastics and men’s boxing.
Even then, before he was unmasked as a crude manipulator of young girls, coach Bela Karoly was known to take women as young as 12 and submit them to inhumane training methods. Some girls were so hungry, they ate toothpaste before they went to bed.
And then there was the unlimited access convicted felon Larry Nassar had to the Karoly Ranch, where the team doctor sexually assaulted many of his 150 victims, heinous acts for which Nassar will spend the rest of his life in prison.
While covering that sport, and the charismatic Karoly, I would have had to be blind not to see that those little girls with a dream were being exploited – though, admittedly, not to the point of sexual assault. No one ever stopped them – not the ambitious parents, the crazed coaches or the greedy administrators.
The breaking point for me came not on the mat but in the boxing ring. I knew right after the incident that I would harbor nothing but disgust for the Olympics for the rest of my life. I have never experienced a more egregious miscarriage of justice in sports than what I witnessed that day 36 years ago.
Long before we got to Korea, I had a chance to get exclusive access to a terrific young man named Anthony Hembrick, a member of the US Army boxing team who had dazzled in the qualifying tournament and was headed to his date with destiny.
Hembrick was favored to win a gold medal, with good reason. He was a quick, powerful middleweight who fought with no fear. Away from the ring, he was engaging and determined. He often said claiming the gold medal would rank above even winning a championship in the inevitable pro career that lie ahead.
Anthony Hembrick never got to fight for his dream. One of his coaches misread the bus schedule on the day of Hembrick’s first Olympic match, and Anthony arrived 12 minutes late to the boxing venue. There was still plenty of time to reschedule the bout, but the South Koreans saw their opportunity to eliminate one of their biggest threats.
Hembrick forfeited the match, and his innocence. He was inconsolable when we finally got to talk to him, as was the coach, Ken Adams. Ha-Jong Ho was declared the winner.
In the long run, Hembrick was probably lucky he didn’t have to step into the ring because the judging of many of the 1988 matches was even more illogical than the decision to crush the young boxer’s dream. (This was the Olympics when Roy Jones Jr. demolished his opponent, Park Si-Hun of South Korea, only to lose the worst boxing decision in Olympics history, 3-2.)
Hembrick went on to have a good, but not great, pro career. I went on to hate the Olympics with a burning passion. Oh, I had to check out a video or two along the way if we were going to talk about it on WIP, but I never missed the opportunity to tell the Anthony Hembrick story on the air, as well.
And even now, after retirement, I feel a moral obligation to continue my assault on the biannual disgrace that is the Olympic Games.
Enjoy the Games if you must.
I’ll be thinking of the look on Anthony Hembrick’s face when bunch of heartless bums stomped out his Olympic dream.