I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was working out at a health club in Forest Hills, New York, minding my own business. All of a sudden, some of the other men started cheering, high-fiving, and shouting "WE BEAT THE F***ING RUSSIANS!"
At first, I thought that World War Three had suddenly broken out and, just as suddenly, ended. No such luck. Turns out that they were celebrating what is now immortalized in sports history as the "Miracle on Ice," the beating of the Russian hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics by a U.S. team composed of amateurs. This was what all the hullabaloo was all about.
I don't diminish what the U.S. team accomplished, given the systematic abuse of Olympic standards by Russian and Eastern Bloc officials. The U.S. team was the underdog, and this is a country that roots for underdogs, especially when we're the underdog. I also have always believed it should be put into some perspective. Much was made of the U.S. "amateur" team, but many of those amateurs went on to play in the NHL, where the level of play and competition is very much at Olympic levels. Then, too, they were effectively playing in front of a home-team crowd at Lake Placid; who knows how much that tilted the overall atmosphere in their favor?
But, above all, it was a sports event. I repeat: a sports event. It did not decide the great issues of the day, save any lives, liberate any peoples, or make life in general easier or more comfortable. It was a hockey game, one of many winter sports events in an overall sports event that has, as its first and foremost goal, the promotion of peace and brotherhood. Not so this particular hockey game: it got folded into the conservative mythological narrative that America is always better than the rest of the world, and became part of the campaign plutonium that put Ronald Reagan in the White House and began the turning of America into a banana republic.
What most people don't see, however, is that, by taking that hockey game and turning it into the moral equivalent of an act of war, we effectively descended to the emotional and mental levels of the people we were so proud of defeating. Sadly, we did much the same thing at the 1972 Summer Olympics, when the men's basketball team refused to accept their silver medals because of what they saw as unfair refereeing in the medals game. Once again, nationalism triumphed in an atmosphere designed to promote mutual understanding and sportsmanship. In Munich, we were poor losers; in Lake Placid, we were poor winners.
I don't deny that we are not the only country that acts this way. But saying that other countries act this way is no justification for American pride. That pride is justified not by descending to the level of your opponents, but by rising above it. Frankly, it is worth losing a game if, in the process, the character you show raises the overall sportsmanship of the event, a value that transcends any one game, or any one Olympics.
Which, in a highly roundabout way, is why I'm almost grateful for this. Let it be a teachable moment for all of us about sportsmanship, and about that thing that conservatives claim is so valuable: character.
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