Stop playing defense, Zorba.
Play the Game(s) your way!
by David Benjamin
TO: Alexis Tsipras, Prime Minister, Hellenic Republic
Dear Prime Minister Tsipras:
Please accept my belated congratulations on your triumph
last month in the Greek-bailout plebiscite. Although this was, in many
respects, a Pyrrhic victory, it gave inspiration to debtors, underdogs
and even chronic deadbeats everywhere.
As one of the millions
who have, at some point in life, suffered from the tyranny of Organized
Money, as one who feels a natural antipathy toward slick financiers and
fat bankers in shiny suits who’ve never done an honest day’s work, I
applaud your resistance to their sadistic hunger to punish your nation
for the public profligacy that they — in their limousines and yachts, in
their villas and penthouses — practice in private impunity.
You now represent the outcast and the downtrodden to a degree rarely seen in a national leader anywhere on earth.
However, as your ensuing clashes with Wolfgang
and the Skinflints has demonstrated, one defiant referendum isn’t
enough to restore Greece to its proper status in the Western world.
What else can you do to inspire the insulted and injured? How can Greece
rise up to provide common folks everywhere a beacon of resistance,
solidarity and common sense?
I propose a grand gesture that
would be uniquely Greek. More important, this is a national project that
would show the world a model of self-sustaining investment and economic
creativity. I refer, of course, to the permanent revival of Greece’s
greatest contribution to modern culture — the Olympic Games.
Yes, geriatric bribe-mongers on the International Olympic Committee already have an Olympics scheduled for next year in Rio de Janeiro. Screw it.
Literally.
Hold your own Games, in Greece, before the “official” Olympics can get
started. Invite the cast of that Olympics to blow off the old farts in
the IOC and come to your Games.
You know this makes sense,
Alexis. The regular Olympics have become a monstrosity of scale,
commercialism, spectacle, corruption, drugs and ugly nationalism. The
construction of the vast facilities necessary to a 21st-century Olympics
requires a host nation to incur insupportable debts, to prostitute
themselves to corporations, to invent ridiculous mascots, and to
construct opulent athletic venues that might well be used once and
mothballed forever after. Every Olympics destroys neighborhoods, uproots
the host city’s most vulnerable citizens and wreaks social turmoil,
while enriching the rich and powerful and glorifying the host nation’s
creepiest, greediest and sleaziest politicians.
In one bold stroke, Greece can begin the dismantling of a bread-and-circus travesty that probably has Baron Coubertin
spinning in his grave. All you need to do is stand on the steps of the
Parthenon, surrounded by the media, and announce that, in June 2016,
Athens will host the first quadrennial Real Olympic Games, in direct
rivalry to the boondoggle in Brazil.
But how can you do this?
It’s easy, Alexis!
Your
first principle must be that the Real Olympics welcomes only individual
athletes competing in real sports with no national, political,
regional, tribal, commercial or corporate affiliation. Every athlete in
the Real Olympics — you will announce — will compete unattached.
Of
course, because only individuals will be welcome, all team sports will
be jettisoned. No rich, rude American basketball players, no
temperamental Brazilian soccer stars, no boring team handball games, no
preposterous water polo games where you can only see the rubber hats on
the players’ heads.
Moreover, because of the naked nationalism
that emerges at every Olympics among the judges of diving, gymnastics
and trampoline, the Real Olympics would sponsor no sports that require
judges. (And how the hell did jumping up and down on a trampoline become
an Olympic sport?)
You would also want to eliminate the last
blood sport allowed in the Olympics (boxing), several sports whose
various world championship competitions overshadow their Olympic
versions (bicycle racing, golf and tennis), sports that require an
animal (jumping over rosebushes on horses), any sport that requires
makeup and sequins, and a few sports that are just too dull to watch
(taekwando, judo, shooting).
This would leave the Real Olympics
with about a dozen real sports that hearken all the way back to the
height of Hellenic athletics — running, swimming, wrestling,
discus-flinging, archery, weightlifting, pole-vaulting, steeplechasing.
decathloning and septathloning, sailing and rowing, with a few badminton
and table tennis matches thrown in. You could even add a few neglected
but popular sports like bowling, horseshoes, squash, Bronx-style
handball and Greek-style bocce.
Everything would fit into gyms,
tracks, stadia, parks and pools that already exist in Athens. With this
limited, but entertaining menu — every event decided by the athletes
themselves — you could run off the whole Real Olympics in one
exhilarating week (while selling two-week Greek-tourism packages to the
fans).
And the best part. After every victory, as the gold medal (perhaps bearing the image of Pheidippedes,
the Greek hero who ran himself to death delivering news of the Battle
of Marathon) is bestowed, there would be one flag ascending toward the
sky — the flag of Greece.
And no national anthems. Ideally, each
victorious athlete could select his own theme music to accompany the
flag-raising. (Personally, I’d either go for Thelonious Monk’s ironic version of “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You,” or George Thorogood
and the Destroyers singing “Get A Haircut” so loud that, by the time
the flag hit the top of the pole, everybody in the stadium would be
clapping hands, dancing in the aisles and wailing out the chorus.)
Honest
to Zeus, Alexis, you could turn the Real Olympics into the best show
since Woodstock. I bet you could get Springsteen to play the opening
ceremony!
As for sponsors, you could sign them up and paint their
names on the fences, but they wouldn’t be allowed to touch the
athletes. No teams. No nations. No flags. No logos. No shoe contracts.
If a high-jumper or breaststroker wanted to compete in the name of his
hometown back in Kansas or Austria, or some worthy outfit like UNICEF or
the Southern Poverty Law Center, great. But Coca-Cola, Exxon-Mobil,
Google and Samsung would be no more welcome than poor old Sam Mussabini
was in Chariots of Fire.
Would athletes sign up? Ask
yourself this: If you were one of the greatest fencers in history with
only one chance at the spotlight every four years, wouldn’t it be nice —
just once — not to be shoved off prime-time TV by a bunch of
pre-pubescent pixies in sparkly leotards doing the splits on a
two-by-four?
Yes, Alexis. If you build it, ESPN will come.
And just imagine how this is gonna piss off Angela Merkel.
Sincerely,
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment