BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : THEY DEVELOP TASTE FOR FREE ENTERPRISE

A few months ago, the family of Benjamin and Sofia Reyes held a meeting around the dinner table in Ft. Worth.

The subject was money, and how to raise enough of it to travel to Barcelona to watch their son Sergio, a Marine, in case he made the U.S. Olympic boxing team.

The family concluded that its No. 1 asset was Sofia’s tamales--chicken tamales with her homemade green salsa.

“Very picante-- hot-hot,” she said, when asked to describe her tamales as she sat in her balcony seat at Joventut Pavilion, where she waited for her son’s first Olympic bout. A few minutes later, she and her husband watched their son, a bantamweight, defeat Harold Ramirez of Puerto Rico.

Benjamin Reyes said that after his son had made the Olympic team in June, a plan was put in motion. Sofia and three of her sisters made about 200 dozen tamales, and a T-shirt program was set up, featuring Sergio’s likeness.

Sergio’s sister, Norma, works for Southwestern Bell in Ft. Worth, and she arranged for most of her mother’s tamales to be sold at the Southwestern Bell cafeteria. T-shirts were distributed to friends and sold city-wide.

The family cleared $8,000 on the T-shirts and $12,000 on the tamales. And so the Reyes family is in a Barcelona hotel--$1,500 for 15 days--and sits in the first row of the balcony at the boxing venue, behind their banner, which proclaims:

“Sergio--We Love You! Mom & Dad.”

Next to the banner is a three-foot American flag.

“My father worked in the hot sun for 25 years, laying concrete,” Sergio says. “I want to win the gold medal for both my parents.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.