Overview:
Hometown heroes Karch Kiraly and Terry Schroeder served as captains for two of America’s medal-winning teams
Those of us from the Baby Boomer generation approached the year 1984 with some trepidation.
Author George Orwell had been warning us about it for 35 years.
This week’s start of the Olympics in Paris is a reminder of my own perilous, 1984 collision with the future.
Exactly 40 years ago, the Santa Barbara News-Press had assigned John Zant and me to cover the Summer Games that were coming to Southern California.
I broke my ankle playing in a softball tournament barely a week before the opening ceremonies.
My orthopedist, Dr. Vic Tacconelli, suggested my very own closing ceremony: surgery that would put the bone together with a screw.
The screw that was already loose in my head had me refuse anything that would keep me from my Olympic rounds.
Doc postponed the surgery, put me in a plaster walking cast that was twice replaced because of cracking, and prescribed an Olympic-sized crate of aspirin.
I throbbed with a sense of lost youth on my 30th birthday when I hobbled to my first rowing event at Lake Casitas in Ojai.
But there also were other fears to confront that summer.
We Baby Boomers were also the first American generation to live under the cloud of terrorism. We had watched on live television as the deadly attack on Israel’s Olympic delegation unfolded during the 1972 Munich Games.
The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee dealt with this in 1984 by coloring its own Games in a soothing array of pastel.
Its staff looked like it was dressed more for selling sherbet than running an Olympics.
Pete Jordano, the mayor of the Olympic Village that housed the rowers, canoers and kayakers at UC Santa Barbara, noted the warmth that was felt even by a Cold War adversary when it arrived at the local venue.
Romania, the only Warsaw Pact nation that didn’t boycott the L.A. Games, housed one-third of its entire Olympic delegation at UCSB.
“They said they wished they could bring their entire team here,” Jordano reported.
But the gauntlet of security that we had to navigate on each visit to the village suggested that these Olympics also wore some darker undergarments.
The International Olympic Committee even required that I obtain a passport a year ahead of time before it would issue me a news media credential. Lake Casitas was the least exotic port of call ever stamped into that book.
Causing a Row
It was amid this atmosphere that I ducked for cover inside the press tent at Lake Casitas when a French journalist began shouting, “Sabotage! Sabotage!”
As it turned out, he was just informing his media brethren that the oar lock broke on France’s boat during the repechage round of the men’s eight rowing competition.
The French claimed that someone tampered with the lock before the race.
It wouldn’t have been the most dastardly act of international espionage, but it did give Santa Barbara’s Barry Berkus some face time with the media as the commissioner of rowing and canoeing.
“I think our security here is good,” he said, noting that the boats had been guarded around the clock.
There also were fears that traffic jams would turn the already engorged freeways of Los Angeles into one, giant parking lot.
But the predictions were so horrific that they had the reverse effect. Most of L.A.’s drivers turned their tailpipes and skedaddled out of town before the two weeks of Olympics even began.
We expected the end of the world that summer, but only the empty freeways made it appear that way.
Peter Ueberroth, a business executive who served as chairman of the LAOOC, turned the Summer Olympics into the Capitalist Games. They were the first to be privately financed and wound up turning a profit of about $223 million.
Take that, you commie boycotters.
Jordano, who served as Ueberroth’s “big brother” when they were members of the Delta Upsilon fraternity at San José State University, believed that the financial troubles experienced by prior Olympics came from having prior Olympians in charge.
“It’s harder to teach an athlete to be a businessman than to have a businessman learn about a sport,” he said.
Knight Terrors
One of my greatest fears about the 1984 Olympics was actually realized. Nothing, after all, is more terrorizing than interviewing basketball coach Bobby Knight.
His team of American collegians was barely challenged throughout the L.A. Games. Those of us who covered them at Inglewood’s Fabulous Forum, however, were plenty challenged by their coach during the media conferences.
Any question that didn’t meet his muster was immediately slam dunked with a sarcastic rebuke.
“I try to help you young guys in this profession you’ve chosen,” Knight said. “It’s one or two steps above prostitution.”
At least the retorts allowed us to feel some kinship with his players. Wayman Tisdale described the coach as “a raging maniac … He put us through pure hell.”
Knight even brought superstar Michael Jordan to tears, according to teammate Sam Perkins.
Jordan did get the last word … even if it was delivered in an anonymous note.
He wrote it on a yellow sheet of legal paper and stuck it between Knight’s offensive and defensive game plans for the gold-medal game against Spain.
“Coach, don’t worry,” it read. “We’ve put up with too much s— to lose now.”
They went out and crushed Spain, 95-65.
How Swede It Is
I found it much less intimidating to interview royalty. I got to meet Sweden’s King Carl Gustav and Queen Silvia in the Lake Casitas media tent after their country won two gold medals in canoeing.
I told them of how my maternal grandfather came to America from Sweden in 1920 when he was only 16. He lied about his age to get a job as a seaman aboard a passenger liner based in Gothenburg and then jumped ship when it docked in New York Harbor.
Only his service in the U.S. Army, I added proudly, prevented him from being deported when his illegal status was detected a quarter-century later.
His highness listened politely before replying, “Then you must know that canoeing has been always a tradition of high standard in Sweden.”
Uh, yeah … although Gramps actually left out that nugget of his story.
Water polo and volleyball did not always have a tradition of high standard in America. Two Santa Barbarans — Terry Schroeder and Karch Kiraly — changed all that during that summer of 1984.
Schroeder, a San Marcos High School graduate, served as captain of the U.S. team that won a silver medal in men’s water polo.
The United States didn’t even qualify for the two prior Olympics.
The Americans didn’t lose a match during the 1984 Games. They tied Yugoslavia in the final, 5-5, but lost the tiebreaker for the gold because of the goal differential throughout the tournament.
It was like kissing a sister — at the retirement home for old nuns.
“I feel like getting a can of gold spray paint,” Schroeder said as he looked at his silver medal.
He actually got more attention that summer for a big chunk of bronze.
Sculptor Robert Graham got Schroeder to pose as the male model for one of the two, nine-foot-tall, naked but headless statues that welcomed visitors at the peristyle end of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. A track athlete from Guyana served as the model for the female statue.
Although the models were supposed to be anonymous, Schroeder’s identity leaked out to the general public. The ribs he soon received about his torso were merciless.
“My teammates were pretty brutal,” he said.
Schroeder’s children were kinder when they saw the statues many years later. Their toughest question was actually asked of his wife, Lori.
“Mom, is that you on the other side?”
A Net Gain
The record for U.S. men’s volleyball was even worse than water polo’s before Kiraly, a Santa Barbara High graduate, signed up for the 1984 Summer Games.
The team hadn’t won a single Olympic match since Mexico City in 1968.
But the American spikers showed their chops during a pre-Olympic tour that included a victory over the mighty Soviet Union.
They lost to the Cubans in a match played in Montana but then beat them before a raucous crowd in the hometown of captain Kiraly.
“A win in Santa Barbara, where fans know us and know volleyball, is much more important to us than a match in Montana,” he said just before the Olympics began.
The whole American affair seemed scripted for a Hollywood ending. I felt that most during an interview with actor Tom Selleck, the team’s honorary captain.
He had experience in the sport, having played with the Outrigger Volleyball Club while taping his Magnum P.I. TV show in Hawai‘i.
“This team has beaten every team that isn’t here,” Selleck said. “These guys dominated the Soviets in four straight games in Russia and they beat the Cubans the last two times they played them.
“For those countries that didn’t come, it’s just their own tough luck.”
Even the Americans’ trajectory in the tournament resonated like a Hollywood cliché. They came back from a humiliating, three-set loss to Brazil in pool play to sweep them in the gold-medal match, 15-6, 15-6, 15-7, at the Long Beach Arena.
Kiraly had hit minus-23% the first time they played them — his worst percentage in four years — and then blistered Brazil with 10 kills in 22 attempts during the final. He added three blocks and passed flawlessly.
When he was presented the Olympic Sportsmanship Award for Volleyball, he used the occasion to trumpet the sport’s success to ABC’s television viewers.
“From what I’ve heard, we’ve been the highest rated show in prime time,” Kiraly crowed. “Hopefully this is going to generate some endorsements and major sponsorships for the men’s and women’s programs.
“I think we’ll stick together if it does.”
It did, and they did, too — with Kiraly leading the United States to another gold medal in indoor volleyball at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
Macho Match
In the euphoric aftermath of the 1984 triumph, American blocker Craig Buck declared with unabashed, male chauvinism that they had finally put to rest the notion that volleyball is “for girls … a sissy sport.”
I followed up that quote by writing, “You can’t color American volleyball pink anymore. It’s now Olympic gold.”
But Kiraly then turned it pink again with the trademark, colorful hat he wore during his beach volleyball career.
He won a gold medal on the sand with Kent Steffes during the Atlanta Games in 1996 to become the only Olympic champion in both versions of the sport.
He also coached the U.S. women’s indoor team to the gold medal at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
He’s now in Paris with the goal of defending that championship.
Terry Schroeder, who won another silver medal at the 1988 Games, was also the head coach of the U.S. men’s water polo team at the 2008 Games in Beijing … where he added to his collection of silver.
I never did need my own piece of silver — the screw that had been prescribed for my ankle.
X-rays showed that my two weeks of walking at the venues in Ojai, Long Beach, Inglewood and the L.A. Coliseum had brought the bone back together.
The Olympic Games came together pretty nicely, too.
As for Orwell, just chalk up his dystopic vision of 1984 as another good piece of fiction.
