Still Organizing : Ueberroth Reflects on L.A. Games, Which He Says He Missed in ’84

As he reflects on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Peter Ueberroth’s memories are of the friends he made while organizing the Games, the “naysayers” who he believes put up obstacles and, most of all, the spirit of Los Angeles and the 70,000 volunteers who made the Olympics a success.

But his memories are not of the athletic events themselves.

Despite being president of the L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee, or perhaps because he was president, Ueberroth said he never really got to see any events other than the opening and closing ceremonies.

“I was moving too fast,” Ueberroth said a few days ago at the downtown L.A. hotel where he spends most nights while directing the Rebuild L.A. effort in the wake of the recent riots.

“It was a blur and I was working on adrenaline in those last few weeks (before the 1984 Games),” Ueberroth said. “I never really got to see an event, and I never have before or since in the (summer) Olympic Games. I saw a little of the Winter Games, because I did get to go to Sarajevo and Lake Placid.

“As I think back, the period of the (1984) Games themselves was painful, because I had gone beyond my limits.

“And I told (wife) Ginny and my kids that I’d like at Year 10, which would be in two years . . . to take the tape of the Games down to about eight hours and watch four hours of the Games one day and four hours of the Games the next day, just to remember what it was about, because I really haven’t done that. It would be a fun thing.”

Ueberroth added: “On balance, the memories that I have are all very positive, because it was what it was intended to be, a great Games for athletes, a fine moment. And the city showed that we can accomplish something.”

Ueberroth, 54, was 41 when he took over direction of the LAOOC in 1979. He owned the country’s second largest travel firm. He was a millionaire, but was living quietly with his family in Encino, a virtual unknown to the public.

But by successfully organizing the L.A. Games--which made a record $222.7-million profit--he found wide-ranging fame.

He was named man of the year for 1984 by Time Magazine and later became commissioner of major league baseball. Even after leaving the commissioner’s office, he has retained the aura of a miracle worker.

Before taking over Rebuild L.A., Ueberroth organized the Contrarian Group, based in Newport Beach, a firm that helps troubled businesses overcome their problems. Earlier this year, he also served as chairman of Gov. Pete Wilson’s Council on California Competitiveness, directed at finding ways to help the state’s struggling economy.

At least three times since the L.A. Games, Ueberroth has toyed with the idea of running for political office, either the U.S. Senate or governor, but decided against it. He remains a Republican, although he has also periodically considered registering as Democrat.

So he has kept busy, and the Rebuild L.A. effort represents a challenge perhaps greater than running an Olympics in the era of international boycotts. He has worked hard, traveled widely, but he also lives comfortably. He has a ranch in Idaho, a principal residence on the Orange County coast, and apparently enough of a fortune that he doesn’t need to work.

In an interview, it’s quickly apparent that Ueberroth remains, as he was in his years at the LAOOC, uncomfortable about many things. He passionately resents those he thinks are negative for the sake of negativity. He questions what he sees as the negative focus of the news media. He has strong, often controversial views, about issues of international sport.

But on many matters he remains an idealist. And he can become almost maudlin when he reflects on some of the people who helped him as Olympic president, such as L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley or the late Paul Ziffren, chairman of the board of the organizing committee, or some of those he met along the way, such as Branko Mikulic, president of the Sarajevo organizing committee.

The Sarajevo Winter Games came five months before the L.A. Games, and if Ueberroth’s Olympic memories have a sentimental cast about anything, it is about the Los Angeles-Sarajevo relationship.

“I recently went home and dug out a Sarajevo-Los Angeles friendship coin, a project we started,” he said. “We couldn’t get our government to agree to mint the coin, due to typical political nonsense in Washington. So the Sarajevo government minted the coin. And it was a touching thing.

“And it is touching now, to be listening to all the problems going on in Bosnia-Herzegovina (the state of which Sarajevo is the capital), and the problems going on in Los Angeles. There’s a sister-city relationship again in a different way, a very negative way. So you realize how much, how quickly with negative leadership, things can decay.”

In Los Angeles during the Olympic period, Ueberroth observed, the city’s diversity turned out to be an advantage.

Paying tribute to the volunteers who helped the organizing committee, Ueberroth said: “If I had to compare, I would think the volunteers would not have worked in a lot of other cities because of the lack of diversity, the diversity in Southern California, and I’m not talking just racial, but the religious diversity, all the diversities.

“When you look back, you have to start with Paul Ziffren. Ziffren had an umbrella impactpolitically. He could put up his umbrella, and the Games could operate underneath it, because he or his wife could call the President of the United States (Ronald Reagan), who was a Republican, even though Ziffren obviously was one of the leaders of the Democrats, and get his help.

“So he created an incredible buffer zone which sheltered us at the organizing committee from all the political horse manure that kept circulating out there.

“When you have a combination of a black mayor from Texas (Bradley) and a Jew with roots in Iowa (Ziffren), and a Protestant with roots in Chicago (Ueberroth) and a head of committee personnel who was also African (Priscilla Florence), when you mix all those kinds of people, it works.”

Ueberroth says that Bradley did not get the credit he deserved.

“It’s the Democrats who didn’t rally around and support the man who really did put forth the idea of the private games and that was Mayor Bradley,” Ueberroth said.

“The Games were successful, became a Republican triumph, Ronald Reagan (getting) terrific praise,” he said. “But Mayor Bradley provided the leadership to doing it privately. It had never been done before. It was his idea.

“And the Democrats at the state level, at the federal level--the ones who brought the boycotts--they and others pretty much not only abandoned him, but they didn’t take credit for the fact that a Democrat had come up with the idea of the private sector initiative, which is usually a Republican plank.”

Ueberroth said aside from Bradley, “I think that the leadership in Los Angeles, the political leadership, the business leadership and the media leadership, were the last to realize that despite five years of naysaying and five years of criticism, that they had a success on their hands, that unfortunately failure was going to be avoided and there was going to be success, and it was going to be a proud and important day. They were the last ones to realize it.”

In general, Ueberroth said: “I think there’s a consistency that goes back to around 1960, there’s been a consistency for the past 32 years, and that is the screamers are heard, the screamers take center stage, and the doers are ignored.

“The problem that happens then is that there become less and less doers. . . . The doers are either ignored or beat up upon or scoffed at.”

As far as the L.A. Olympics were concerned, Ueberroth said: “All during that period from 1979 to late ‘84, there was a constant domination by the naysayers.

“I think the naysayers are good, if they also do something themselves. I really don’t mind a naysayer who is plowing his own field somewhat in the city, trying to do something that’s effective. But there’s an awful lot of people that just are loud voices with hollow work ethics.

“But I have no bitterness. It was a kind of learning for me, as I went from absolute obscurity to being a factor in the community.”

Ueberroth has no doubt that the Games were a positive influence.

“It set patterns for all of sport, not just the Olympics,” he said. “But it’s been misreported, the marketing side (of the 1984 Games). At the beginning, nobody wanted them, including Los Angeles. So the fact that after our success, there’s eight, nine, 10 cities bidding very competitively for future Olympics is a gift that Los Angeles gave to the Olympic movement.

“And the remuneration for the Olympic movement has skyrocketed. I remember, in ‘79, when the bank balances in the International Olympic Committee were very small, a couple of million dollars, $3 or $4 million. Now, it’s in the hundreds of millions.”

Despite the unprecedented success in making money and showing others how to do so, Ueberroth emphasizes that Los Angeles practiced commercialism with limits.

“We really developed the idea of sports sponsorship, and non-commercialism of the actual events at the same time,” he said. “People forget that there were no signs permitted in any of the stadiums, there was no commercial identification allowed on the athletes, or any of that.

“Now, I think you can take commercialism too far when the athletes become billboards or where everything is a named event.”

Ueberroth said he supports commercialism with limits, because he thinks it is better that business pay for staging sporting events rather than government or charity, but he said he is opposed to the professionalism the Olympic movement has recently accepted among the athletes.

He said he would not be watching America’s basketball stars in Barcelona because of their prospective 60-point victory margins.

“I don’t think that that’s any fun,” he said, adding that he prefers when “some coach could take a bunch of college kids, practice with them for eight months and figure that we’ll beat everyone in the world.”

Does Ueberroth have any final message about the Los Angeles Games?

“People are more inclined to accept pessimism (than) they are ready to open themselves to the possibility of success,” he said. “There’s too much predisposition that things are going to go wrong.”