COMMENTARY : Play Ball: Steinbrenner Streamlines USOC

Symbolic of the man himself, the era of George Steinbrenner in the United States Olympic Committee came on here Sunday like a runaway freight train.

The USOC House of Delegates’ annual meeting this weekend was expected to be a Steinbrenner dog and pony show that would, after a year of review, pass legislation recommended by Steinbrenner’s Overview Commission and geared to “streamline the organization” and make it more businesslike. Which is exactly what happened.

But the final debate on Steinbrenner’s measures, and a later announcement of a new USOC television package that will bring the organization $30 million in the next two years, gave real clarity to the future direction of this group that is publicly mandated to carry forth the efforts and aspirations of Olympic athletes in the United States.

In short, the days of bake sales and car washes are over. The volunteerism mentality that existed for so long in so many national Olympic programs, giving the USOC an attractive but probably inappropriate mom-and-pop-store feel, has been clinging to a ledge in recent years. And Sunday, Steinbrenner and the USOC hierarchy stepped on lots of fingers.

Steinbrenner’s commission recommended that the House of Delegates, its main governing body numbering 400, do away with itself and yield the management of the USOC to a 97-member board of directors, dictating to a 16-member executive committee.

So instructed, the House of Delegates, voting in open session, obediently threw itself on its own sword. The final vote, as conducted by USOC President Robert Helmick, was carried on voice approval. Not even a whimper of a nay.

But to get to that point, Steinbrenner, a USOC vice president, had to stand up at the pulpit one more time, just in case there was any lingering doubt that, despite some squeaky wheels, the only thing getting any grease at this session was the proposal of his commission. So he arose, stirred to speak by a plea from longtime soccer official Gene Edwards that, with this demolition of the House of Delegates, the “grass-roots people in the USOC were about to lose their voice” and that the “Olympic business belongs to everybody.”

Steinbrenner stood and the assembly, responding as if he were E.F. Hutton, went dead still. It was dog-and-pony time for the man who has owned the New York Yankees for years, but is a newcomer to this Olympic business. And Steinbrenner gave it his best pit bull and buckin’ bronco.

“I stand before you and speak as your everyday American steely eyed executive,” he said. “This commission has worked long and hard, and I want it known that nobody sought to disenfranchise anybody. . . . I take issue with what Gene Edwards said. . . . We must run this as an efficient organization to benefit the athletes. Doing what we are about to do is a better way of election.

“Let’s not get lost in romantic theory. We’ve got lots of things to finance. I do not want to see our kids out there selling T-shirts or sneaking into ice cream stores for food in the middle of the night.

“And I resent the implication that we are trying to disenfranchise anybody.”

After that, there were no dissenters. It was to be the last word on the matter. The bull had run through the china shop and the pieces left behind were mere incidentals. The USOC, which really had no choice because of the size of its mandate and the enormity of its financial needs, became Madison Avenue.

Edwards, for many years head of the U.S. Soccer Federation, said afterward, “You can’t win them all. I just don’t think people here in this very group understand exactly what is going on.”

But he also had a parting shot for Steinbrenner.

“You just wonder,” he said. “Here you’ve got a guy who has owned a baseball team for 17 years and has had 17 different managers in that time, and, well, it makes you stop and think, is everybody else wrong?”

Phase II of Sunday’s climb onto the corporate bandwagon took place with the announcement that the USOC, for the first time, had negotiated an overall contract for all its national governing bodies. That contract will put 250 hours of Olympic sports on the three major networks and three cable networks between now and the Olympic year of 1992 for a rights fee of $30 million. The contract guarantees at least $100,000 to each of 41 U.S. Olympic and Pan American sports organizations.

Besides NBC, ABC and CBS, which will get about 50 of the 250 hours, Olympic sports will be seen on ESPN, Turner Sports and SportsChannel America. ABC and NBC are expected to air about 20 hours each and CBS about 10 hours, most of it lead-in Winter Olympic programming. ESPN and Turner will get 30 to 40 hours each and SportsChannel America will carry the bulk of the programing with about 125 hours, including a weekly show that will allow the USOC to give exposure to some of its less-popular sports unlikely to be given any event coverage by the other networks.

The package was put together, at the request of the USOC, by Eddie Einhorn, president of the Chicago White Sox, who worked closely with Steinbrenner on the project.

That connection left one longtime Olympic official, who shall go unnamed, to wonder aloud whether, in future years, the Olympics will have an Opening Ceremony, or somebody will just throw out the first ball.