Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 18, 1994 TAG: 9402190005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Moe, especially, personifies the ideal - or stereotype - of American heroism represented for earlier generations by Charles A. Lindbergh and the smiling faces of soldiers, sailors and Marines on posters boosting national morale, or selling bonds, during World War II.
With his blond good features, upright bearing, straightforward ways and constant smile, Moe, the grandson of a Norwegian immigrant to the United States, seems to all of us to be like either what we once believed we were or what we like to believe our sons and grandsons could be - if they'd only try a little harder.
Moe even comes with a story of difficulties overcome: He was a mildly bad boy during his early adolescence; he smoked pot and disobeyed his father, who jerked him up, took him to Alaska, put him to work practically around the clock and cured him of his waywardness. There is nothing, for most of us, like a sinner brought to salvation, and Moe, whose sins were hardly scarlet in the first place, perfectly fits the bill.
None of this is said to mock Moe, let alone to diminish his triumph, for he, like his counterpart in the women's downhill Super G, Diann Roffe-Steinrotter, deserves our highest praise. Both are likely to get it, in the form of advertising endorsements, invitations to appear on television and in movies and perhaps - probably - dinners honoring them at the White House.
It is all a reassuring - if only mildly reassuring - contrast to the sordid and evidently endless tale of Tonya Harding, whose proximity to, if still unproven direct involvement in, an attempt to cripple her rival, Nancy Kerrigan, on the eve of the Olympics has cast a dark and unflattering shadow across the entire spectacle.
Greedy, ambitious and obsessed with ``winning,'' Harding, alas, may better characterize what has happened to international athletics than Moe or the other clean-cut jocks and jockesses turning up in Norway.
What has happened to them, few need telling, is the lurid combination of money and television, and between them money and television have managed to take the magnificent physical achievements of the young and turn them into adventures on the fast track.
Harding perfectly embodies this spirit, for, as is well and truly known to everyone still sentient after a month of the Harding scandal, the stakes for her in winning the gold are in the millions of dollars, an achievement, quite apart from her undeniable skill on the ice, that would lift her from the gutter in which she was born and raised.
Yet none of this would have seized the attention of the public to the degree it has done without television, which, bemused by scandal and mystery, has once again made itself a central player in a conflict.
Television's part in bringing the Olympics to the American public, moreover, has been a saga of unending cupidity in which pictures - Moe's Sunday victory, for example, which occurred early in the morning but was not shown onscreen until nearly 11 p.m. - were and will be delayed until prime time; in which ``commercial breaks'' sometimes total as many as eight and 10 at a clip; and in which CBS ``personalities'' fill the screen most of the time with ``features'' that help postpone the actual showing of Olympic events. CBS is making the most of its monopoly on American coverage, but at a cost in confidence in its decency that ought to hound it in the few years left it on the domestic scene.
What remains - what not even the Harding scandal or the greedy behavior of CBS can wholly diminish - is the skill, discipline and sheer valor of the young athletes themselves. Not even the golden dollar can account for what they have accomplished, and one can only wish that the Olympics had been left to them.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB