WINTER OLYMPICS : Leave It to George and His Good Old Yankee Know-How

Far, far away, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA, all is calm, all is bright. Baseball players practice bunting. Coaches hit grounders. Managers drool tobacco. The New York Yankees are at peace. Spring training is a breeze. George Steinbrenner is, you see . . . someplace else.

We take you now, north by northwest, to sunny Calgary, Canada, where a volunteer has stepped forward to offer the United States of America, in its time of need, some of his good old Yankee know-how. Ladies and gentlemen, that warm wind that just blew into town is not the Chinook. It is, you see . . . George.

Appointed chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s new “Overview” panel, which will review American performance and address ways that it can be improved, Steinbrenner turned up here Wednesday to emphasize how much the Olympic movement means to him.

No, he didn’t fire anybody. No, he didn’t threaten to trade Willie Gault to Sweden if he made any more protests about the bobsled squad. No, he didn’t intervene in the hockey team’s situation by bringing back Sweet Lou Vairo as coach. No, he didn’t issue a public apology for the United States having won only four medals to date.

Quite the contrary. Steinbrenner was very much the optimist, very much Captain America. The Olympics aren’t even over yet, he said. They aren’t over until they’re over.

“It’s like that song Tommy Tune sings: ‘It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish,’ ” the Yankee owner said, chirping as cheerfully as an oriole or a blue jay.

And here we were, half-expecting him to do what most of our Olympians have so much trouble doing: Meddle.

Instead, Steinbrenner was pitching his time and money and services on behalf of a bigger, better America. He was saying that he has been serious about amateur athletics for as long as he can remember, maybe ever since he was a small-time college hurdler in Ohio, or since he threw his support behind the Junior Olympics program, or since he owned an AAU basketball team called the Cleveland Pipers that toured the Soviet Union, back when we were still calling it Russia.

“Must have been around 1960,” Steinbrenner said, “because I remember that the first cosmonaut was one of the people who came to a game.”

Nearly 30 years later, the United States is still having trouble competing on an even level with the Soviets in the Winter Olympics, and Steinbrenner wants to know why. Is it because our athletes are not state-supported? Should we have our own fully financed, national hockey team, instead of 23 college-aged kids who get together for six months? Should our pro athletes go to the Games?

“It’s a matter of national and international pride,” Steinbrenner said. “The World Series, the Super Bowl, while there is some international interest, it doesn’t pit nation against nation the way the Olympics do. We look up to our Olympic athletes, or at least our young people do. Maybe that’s an undue burden on the athletes, but if there’s something we can do to help them, we should try to do it.”

Steinbrenner said there are two ways to look at it. Twice in the last last eight Olympics, our hockey team, against enormous odds, won the gold medal. “If you can do it two times, you can do it three times,” Steinbrenner said. “Obviously, it’s not impossible for us to win, so maybe we’re doing everything right. Then again, if you think we should be winning all time, maybe we’re doing everything wrong. Think about Korea. I don’t think it’s gonna be any picnic over there, either. But, do we want to send our NBA basketball players over there to compete against the Russians? I don’t think it would be much of a game, do you? Is that what the Olympics should be? I honestly don’t know. That’s what we want to study in the months ahead.”

Well, George, funny you should bring that up.

Baseball will be a demonstration sport this September in Korea, and a 1992 Summer Olympics medal sport in Barcelona, Spain. Baseball is our national pastime. Baseball is not bobsledding, or team handball, or Greco-Roman wrestling. Baseball is America , man. Baseball is Abner and Nelson Doubleday, Shoeless Joe and Reggie Jackson, Josh and Kirk Gibson. We can lose in luge, but baseball?

So, George, how would you feel about giving up one of your ballplayers to the U.S. cause during a pennant drive?

“Oooh,” he said. “That’s a hell of a question.”

He thought long and hard about it.

“I’d have to think long and hard about it,” he said.

He thought some more.

“I suppose if the other teams were willing to do it,” Steinbrenner said, “and if it wouldn’t decimate my team, then I’d say yes. You certainly wouldn’t want to give up one of your main stars. If I could give up a regular and replace him adequately with a Triple-A player, then yes, I think I’d do it.

“I feel that strongly about (the Olympics),” Steinbrenner added. “Of course, I’ll probably hear from the commissioner about this tomorrow morning.”

By the way, how about those Yankees, George? How do they look? “I haven’t been down there,” he said. “Everybody’s asking me, ‘George, what about the pitching? George, what about the pitching?’ I talk to my people, Lou (Piniella) and Billy (Martin) and they tell me, ‘Everything’s fine.’ ”

George is more concerned at the moment about America than he is about the American League. Still, it has not escaped his attention that two coaches from the Soviet Union, national team Coach Alexander Adratov and his assistant, Gela Cheehradge, have been camping out at the Dodgers’ training camp in Vero Beach.

“We’ve gotta get those guys away from that tranquil Dodger camp and down to our place,” Steinbrenner said. “I heard one of them can throw pretty good. We need pitching, so we’d better take a look at him. I’ll go down there and check him out, personally.”