Stop playing defense, Zorba. Play the Game(s) your way!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#731)

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,