A TALE OF THREE COUNTRIES : IOC Plays Politics With Her Dream

If you think that politics and sports don’t mix, consider the story of Insook Bhushan, housewife from Denver and mother of two small boys. Oh, yes, and world-class table tennis player.

Months ago, Bhushan opened her morning newspaper, turned to the sports section and burned her tongue on her coffee.

Right there in front of her was perhaps the worst news she could have received, outside of some tragedy to her family. The International Olympic Committee, desiring to appease North Korea--not to mention the entire Soviet Bloc--over the selection of South Korea as the site of the 1988 Olympic Games, had given the OK to hold a few Olympic sports in North Korea.

That’s right, Pyongyang. Across the 38th parallel. On the other side of the DMZ. And to Bhushan, the former Na Insook of Seoul, who moved to the United States at 22 and married an architect of Indian descent, the end of the world.

Insook Bhushan, now 35, is the best female table tennis player in the United States. Her sport will become an Olympic event for the first time in the Seoul Games. Her athletic future was spiced with the joy of training for the highest international competition in the city of her birth and memories. And then the IOC politicians turned her joy to fear. To Bhushan, North Korea might just as well have been the moon. The head of the IOC might just as well have been Thomas Wolfe. Maybe you can’t go home again.

“My first reaction was that I wouldn’t go,” said Bhushan at the Pan American Games here. “I didn’t want to. I was very upset. I was frightened.”

But now she thinks that she will go, assuming she makes the U.S. team in trials with Canada and Bermuda in November or December. That’s a fairly good assumption, since she hasn’t lost to a U.S. woman in table tennis since 1976.

“I talked to my husband and he wants me to use my talent, not waste it,” she said. “And I told him, after all, I had been there once, and I did come back.”

Bhushan competed in the 1979 World Championships in North Korea as part of the U.S. team. Her most pleasant memory of that seems to be that she lived to return.

“I was the only South Korean player there,” she said. “They didn’t allow the team from South Korea in, nor Israel, if I remember correctly.

“And I remember how it felt. They had 20,000 people watching, and I could feel them all looking at me. They didn’t do anything mean, but I always was getting dirty looks. And they rooted against me. That kind of stuff shouldn’t bother me, but it did.

“I had a few good wins there, but the whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth.

“When I decided to go, I told myself I’m not going to think about that. I have to think about the game, not the place.”

But Bhushan says that the situation weighs heavily on her mind, even now, after deciding to go.

“I remember things about being there,” she said. “I remember some coaches from England telling me I’d be lucky to get out of there alive. That made me really scared. I stayed inside in the hotel, and I always walked to the hotel, which was very close to where we played, with other players.”

She added that she feels somewhat easier with her situation now. She is a U.S. citizen. In 1979, she merely had a green card.

“And I think things have loosened up a little bit since then,” she said.

Bhushan has been U.S. champion in her sport nine times. She missed twice while having her sons, now 6 and 2. She was unbeaten in the 1983 Pan Am Games, winning gold medals in team, mixed and women’s doubles and singles. And she was unbeaten in the ’87 Pan Am Games here until Friday, when she and Diane Gee of San Carlos, Calif., were upset in women’s doubles.

So Bhushan, who has already won gold medals in team and mixed competition, will attempt to add a third in singles, starting today.

“I am training harder now, and I want to do well in Seoul,” she said. “The problem is that we don’t enter enough international competitions. Some countries go to eight and 10 international meets a year. Here, we go to the Worlds every two years. So it is difficult.”

But that’s a difficulty of another degree. Certainly nothing like the difficulty the politics of the IOC have handed Bhushan.

“Yes, I will go,” she said. “But I am scared.”