No, I really don't care about the Olympics, but I've got this quote I've been wanting to share . . .

Is Japan's Kohei Uchimura, who was generally conceded to be a shoo-in for male gymnastics' Olympic all-around gold (as it turned out, rightly so), "the greatest male gymnast who ever lived," as many people are saying? I don't know. I've never seen him do his gymnastics stuff. What I do know is that he's ridiculously hot, which I consider way more important.

by Ken

I've been hoping all week that I would come up with something to say about the Olympics. Not that I care about the Olympics, which I don't, but because I've been sitting on a great quote I wanted to share. To make life more complicated, it's not really an Olympics quote, strictly speaking. It's part of the background that New Yorker critic at large Louis Menand establishes for his unexpectedly absorbing piece this week, "Glory Days: What we watch when we watch the Olympics." It's an abounding cornucopia of resources shedding light on an astounding range of issues relating to athletic glory and the way we look at it and think about it, and especially the way we look at and think about Olympic competition.

It's a measure of just how absorbing Menand's piece is that it fascinated and delighted me all the way through, despite my Olympic-interest level having dropped over the decades to just about zero. For example, suddenly I'm hearing about this Kohei Uchimura, and his current dominance of the male-gymnastics world. Once upon a time I would probably have seen many of the highlights of his apparently glorious career, in the days when I managed to persuade myself that those phenomenal performances were in themselves things of beauty -- not to be confused with the amazing bodies that are developed in the pursuit of such phenomenal performances, which are unquestionably things of beauty.

I made a point of searching out some pictures of Kohei, and while they're not quite showing him the way I'd like to see him shown, what they show is highly satisfying. It almost makes me wish I'd devoted some attention to watching some of the Olympics gymnastics. And then I'm reminded that that would have meant spending all that time watching, ugh, gruelingly pointless, you know, gymnastics.

I'm startled to find that I have arrived at more or less the position that Louis Menand ascribes to his family in the opening of his piece (here's the link again):

I had a grandfather who played the horses. That was about as close as anyone in my family got to competitive sports, unless you count mixed doubles. Sports, or, as my relatives used to put it, "that damn fool athletic stuff," were not among our household enthusiasms. In general, we did not genuflect much before the temple of the body. Just the concept of exercise, the notion that a person should "work out" in order to "stay in shape," would have been greeted with incomprehension. In shape to do what? Health we understood. We knew what made a person healthy: sleeping with the windows open and drinking three glasses of whole milk a day. It was pretty simple.

A more principled reason for this indifference was an aversion to the belief, popular when I was growing up, that the ability to run faster or throw farther than other people is a contribution to the common good, and that we ought to honor the athlete in the same way that we honor the artist and the statesman. Games, in my house, were O.K., because games are fun. Sports are games taken much too seriously. Organized sports are an attempt, through regimentation (uniforms and trophies) and rhetoric (rah-rah boosterism and coach talk), to give an inherently pointless activity some kind of point, to inject a purpose into play.

In this flock, I was the unlikely black sheep. . . .

Alas, young Louis's dreams of athletic glory will come up against a harsh fact of athletic life, when he discovers that one of his idols, the great Bob Cousy, known for being "undersized for his sport," is only undersized by the standard of other professional basketball players.

It turns out -- something they don't tell you when they're urging you to go for the gold, follow your dream, etc. -- that, in most sports, size and strength are kind of important. I had imagined that all I needed was brains and the will to win. Though a strapping five-nine today -- closer to five-nine and a half, really -- in the prepubescent days of my love affair with sports I was a shrimp.

One of my idols was Bob Cousy, the playmaking guard of the Boston Celtics, regularly described as undersized for his sport. As I diligently heaved basketballs in the general direction of distant rims, I pictured myself a future Houdini of the Hardwood (one of Cousy's nicknames), swift and savvy, executing the behind-the-back pass or finishing off the fast break with a supercool underhand layup. One day when I was in junior high, the Cooz, now retired, came to town to direct a clinic at the local high school, and our gym class was invited to watch. It was an experience I'll never forget. Cousy walked onto the court, and my heart sank. Bob Cousy was tall.

[For the record, the Cooz was listed as six feet one. -- Ed.]

Anyway, this leads to the portion of his piece into which Menand slips the not-specifically-Olympic-themed quote I've been trying to find an occasion to share with you.

A lot of kids get hooked on sports by television. Television -- another altar we didn't worship at in my house. But I did get to watch "Wide World of Sports." The show, which was on the air for thirty-seven years, was created and produced by Edgar Scherick and Roone Arledge, telecommunications visionaries who grasped a basic ingredient of male psychology, which is that, no matter what kind of contest you put on the screen, men will say, "Wait a second. I just want to see how this comes out." [Emphasis added.]

I love that! "No matter what kind of contest you put on the screen, men will say, 'Wait a second. I just want to see how this comes out.' " And almost immediately we're offered a case in point. Wide World of Sports, Menand tells us, became "the first program to broadcast Wimbledon in the U.S., and to cover exotic and far-flung sports like surfing, curling, and jai alai."

The producers were right: people who knew little and cared nothing about curling still wanted to see how it came out.

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