Rams, Chiefs Carving Own Place in History

The bus eases to a halt in front of two solemn columns of granite. A brown shirt leaves the guard station, waves the bus through and pushes a button that retracts a gate of black wrought-iron spikes.

The bus weaves to the left, passing alongside the rugged gray walls, the steel bars and the stained limestone pillars, heading to a side entrance where another guard awaits its arrival.

The bus carries no prisoners, just the Rams to their Tuesday morning workout.

Berlin’s Olympiastadion, a monumental failure in both objective and design, gets a second chance at sports history Saturday when the Rams and the Kansas City Chiefs play in American Bowl ’90. This time, it hosts the first National Football League game in Germany. Last time, it hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, two weeks that neatly foreshadowed the fall Adolf Hitler would have nearly a decade later in another arena.

The 1936 Olympics were in tended to be Hitler’s games, a five-ringed international propaganda rally. The Aryan race was going to rule these races and the rest of the world was going to gain an education in Hitler’s wacked-out theory of success-through-genetics.

Since Olympiastadion was to serve as Hitler’s stage, it was built to look the part. The result was as grim and foreboding as a Nazi storm trooper, a 76,000-seat military barracks cast in limestone, marble, granite and basalt.

Apparently, Cleveland Stadium was drawn from the same blueprint.

Hitler oversaw all the architectural planning, down to the selection of the stone blocks. Natural stone and not concrete was to be used, Hitler decreed, because it symbolized “indomitable German strength and the enduring nature of the National Socialist ideology.”

One thing Hitler ignored, however, is now also cast in stone, on the wall next to the Olympic torch--a complete listing of 1936 gold medalists.

The first two lines read:

100m LAUF: OWENS, U.S.A.

200m LAUF: OWENS, U.S.A.

A young American black named Jesse Owens forever altered the meaning of those games with the four gold medals he swept away, including the long jump--then known as the broad jump--and the 4 x 100-meter relay. The broad jump pit occupies the same spot as it did then--situated, tauntingly, only feet away from the Fuhrer’s private box.

It is eerie to watch the Rams train amid such surroundings. They practice outside the stadium, at the adjacent Maifeld, where Mussolini addressed a crowd of 900,000 Germans in 1937. They run pass patterns in the shadow of the Bell Tower, which was destroyed by Soviet troops during World War II and rebuilt during the 1950s. To get from the field to the locker room, they pass between two mammoth sculptures of German athletes and walk down a corridor decorated by Gothic iron torches. All that’s missing is a gargoyle by the bench.

The facility does not sport one swatch of paint. It is a uniform mausoleum gray, save for the black scorch marks sustained during Allied bombing near the end of the war.

According to stadium manager Peter Schliesser, the south half of the coliseum was shelled after the Allies learned the Nazis were manufacturing radio equipment underneath the stands. Had they been enemies of real taste, they would have hit the northern half, too.

In truth, the building was spared greater damage for strategic purposes, since Allied pilots often used Olympiastadion as a directional checkpoint during their raids on Berlin.

Reconstruction began in 1952 and lasted a decade. It has been restored with its original Teutonic austerity in tact, although several concessions to contemporary demands have been added.

Today, an electronic scoreboard, capable of rendering full-color replays, hangs from the east end. In preparation of the 1974 World Cup, an acrylic rain cover-and-light-structure was suspended above the north and south rims of the stadium.

Also, the schedule of events has changed. Two second-division soccer teams, Hertha BSC and Blau-Weiss 90, play their home games at Olympiastadion. The annual West German Cup soccer final is also held there. On the stadium grounds, an outdoor amphitheater shows American movies--a recent viewing of “Dirty Dancing” drew 20,000 --and the Maifeld is now used for rock concerts.

“The Maifeld seats 60,000 in the stands plus 250,000 on the grass,” Schliesser says. “All the promoters are looking forward to getting that in their hands.”

The Globetrotters have also played Olympiastadion, most notably in 1953, when Owens accompanied the team for his first post-Olympics return to Berlin. The event attracted an overflow crowd of 77,000--most of them uninterested in exploding basketballs.

“Jesse Owens is very popular here,” Schliesser says. “When he died, they named a street after him, Jesse Owens Allee. It runs right by the stadium.”

Schliesser said Owens made many visits after that. “I must have met him five times,” Schliesser says. “He liked to come back here.”

Owens was one of the few, but then, he was one of the proud.

The Rams and the Chiefs? They are here on a different mission. This week, the disbelievers are soccer fans, who have yet to observe a better brand of football than their own brand.

The conversion attempt will take place Saturday night. By then, Olympiastadion will be festooned with giant inflatable Ram and Chief helmets. Its bleachers will be dotted with Ram and Chief T-shirts. Its end zones will be painted Ram blue and Chief red.

Good. The place could use some color.