ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 27, 1996 TAG: 9607300118
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHICAGO
SOURCE: PAUL GALLOWAY CHICAGO TRIBUNE
The year is 1968, and a bull session is under way in a New York City hotel room among a group of distance runners in town for the Millrose Games, a top event of the indoor track season.
An insight is about to strike one of the athletes in the room, a 21-year-old half-miler from Catholic University of America named John MacAloon, an insight that will transform his passions for running and for social and cultural questions into a profession, one that will plumb the mystique and complexities of sport through the phenomenon of the Olympic Games.
It occurs when the talk turns to the odd things that can happen to your mind during a race, how you seem sometimes to be having almost an out-of-body experience, how sometimes you can find yourself in a kind of white-out, how 40,000 people in a stadium can be cheering and screaming and you hear absolutely nothing because somehow you are running in what seems a cone of total silence.
MacAloon tells of a feeling he sometimes has, a feeling that someone else is running through him.
A fellow American nods in agreement, saying how strange it feels when that happens.
Then Kip Keino, the great miler from Kenya, speaks.
``I don't understand why you say this is strange,'' he says. ``Of course, someone is running through you. It is your ancestors.''
Keino's words are revelatory to MacAloon.
``I think my vocation was born in that moment,'' he says today. ``It occurred to me that Americans and Africans were running the same race and having the same `experience' but couldn't speak about it in the same way.''
MacAloon, now 49, is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Chicago and has devoted his career as a scholar and author to studying the influence and meaning of athletics among the world's peoples, nations, societies.
He does it by concentrating primarily on the Olympics, interviewing and getting to know the members of that community - athletes, coaches, judges, groundskeepers, local organizers, event producers, sponsors, international officials - just as other anthropologists might live and work with the inhabitants of a remote jungle or island community.
``You don't have to go to primitive cultures to find strange ideas,'' MacAloon says. ``Ask yourself: Why people are running around in short pants every four years and why do so many people care?''
Good questions. He's got more.
Why did some 3.5 billion people watch the opening ceremony of this year's Olympics on television? And before the Games, why did millions of people line the streets and roads and highways to get a glimpse of the runners carrying the Olympic torch?
It's not because people want to somehow tap into that 15 minutes of fame for themselves, he says, or because the media and the commercial sponsors tell us this is important.
So why do they? Why do we? For all sorts of potent and complicated reasons, he says. Reasons - some primal, some tribal, some spiritual - that will be largely unexamined by the mass media.
Indeed, if there's one thing MacAloon has learned over the years, it's that there's a lot more going on in Atlanta during the Olympics than you can get from listening to NBC and reading the sports pages.
``Our media tend to see the Olympics as a show, an entertainment spectacle,'' he says. ``But for millions of people in other countries - and also in our own - this is more than a pretty pageant. ... It is, in fact, the only collective global ritual that the world's people have.''
In many countries, the gathering of the national teams is a validation of their standing in the world.
``There are two main measures of nationhood - membership in the UN and marching at the Olympics,'' MacAloon says. ``The Olympics are a centerpiece of national destiny.''
A team with the name Palestine is competing in Atlanta this year. Estonia is fielding its second team since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Taiwan is competing under another name - the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee - so it can participate.
``Think what the opening ceremony's march-in means to the people from those countries and the Palestinians,'' MacAloon says.
The importance of the Olympics, he continues, derives from this search for national identity and also from what he calls ``a longing for the sacred.''
Our writers and TV commentators - as well as many Americans in general - often overlook or avoid these aspects, he says, because of our egalitarian traditions and our athletic dominance.
``[Alexis] de Tocqueville noted that Americans are uncomfortable with ceremony,'' MacAloon says. ``Public rituals suggest status, hierarchy.''
MacAloon looked at thousands of feet of videotape to see how 25 nations covered the 1992 opening ceremony. ``The coverage by many countries was profoundly different from ours,'' he says. ``South Korea and Papua New Guinea, for example, used terms for religious rituals." If NBC had treated the ceremony as a religious ritual, they'd have been in trouble, he added.
For most countries, the opening and closing ceremonies are the most important events of the Games because these are the only occasions at which they receive a kind of equal recognition. Of the 197 nations participating, MacAloon notes, perhaps only 50 will have athletes who win medals by the time the event ends Aug. 4.
The success our athletes have, he says, could distract us from the most enjoyable way to view the Olympics, which is to be aware of the emotions we feel as we watch and the themes that cause them to arise.
He lists three levels at which sport and society interact - the national, the individual and the global.
``On the first level, we'll say, `America won the 800 meters.' That's a metaphor, an attempt to say we're one society, the athlete's body represents the social body.''
At the second, or individual, level, the athlete serves as a symbol of the democratic ideal. ``Our mythology is that when you're competing, it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, black or white or brown or yellow, whether you are educated or not. Everyone is equal,'' he says.
The third level is global. ``The world's massive diversity and terrible inequality leave us with few symbols and performances that we can all take at least a passing interest in together,'' MacAloon says. ``The Olympics at its best provides this common ground for nations.''
LENGTH: Long : 125 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The flags of the nations participating in the Summerby CNBOlympic Games (above) reflect unwavering spirit. 2. U.S. gold medal
gymnast Kerri Strug's (bottom right) perseverance Tuesday night
reflects the mental challenge the athletes face. color.
3. Cultural anthropologist John MacAloon has devoted his career
to studying the meaning and influence of athletics.|< AP