New York Gets Goodwill Games : Site selection: The safe choice would have been Dallas-Ft. Worth, but celebrities wow committee.

Jack Kelly, president of the Goodwill Games, surveyed the crowded room at the CNN Center during a reception Wednesday night and said, “Would you have believed two years ago that these kind of people would come to us and ask for the Games?”

He referred to the political, business and sports leaders from four communities--Dallas-Ft. Worth, Miami-South Florida, New York and St. Louis--who were here to meet with a site selection committee Thursday in their bid for the 1998 Goodwill Games.

Most prominent among the bidders--rivaled for attention only by hosts Ted Turner and Jane Fonda--were New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and New York Mayor David Dinkins. The show of strength by the New York Sports Commission overwhelmed the other candidates.

“A lot of heads are turned by celebrity,” said a concerned member of the Dallas-Ft. Worth bid committee, which countered with former football coach Tom Landry but was unable to produce Gov. Ann Richards, who was occupied with the Clinton-Gore campaign.

So impressed were most people there that few even flinched when Cuomo pledged $4 million for the construction of an aquatics center on Long Island and then added, “Whatever an aquatics center is . . . “

Perhaps Goodwill Games officials could relate because that is how their venture often has been described. The first two, in 1986 at Moscow and 1990 at Seattle, were financial and critical failures, conditions that are not guaranteed to improve in 1994 at St. Petersburg, Russia.

Of the Goodwill Games, an International Olympic Committee executive board member, Richard Pound of Canada, said last week, “They’re on a treadmill and can’t get off.”

But Friday’s announcement by Kelly that the site selection committee selected New York for the 1998 Games was designed to change that perception.

Dinkins said Wednesday night that the Goodwill Games would have an economic impact of $500 million on the city. Although that figure might be exaggerated, it was because of the potential financial benefits that Dinkins and Cuomo were here.

But more important to Turner, the event’s founder, and Kelly, was the impact New York could have on the Goodwill Games.

Most site selection committee members agreed that the early favorite, Dallas-Ft. Worth, was the safe choice. But with Turner’s board of directors becoming impatient for signs of success, they recognized that the safe choice was not necessarily the best one.

In baseball lingo that has been heard more and more often around the Bush campaign, the Goodwill Games needed a home run. Only New York could provide that. It also could provide a mugging, but Games officials will take their chances.

As the song says, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”