WORLD SPORTS SCENE : Hospitality Going South for Games

Perhaps the Bubba factor is too much to overcome in the Atlanta Olympic organizers’ efforts to have their city recognized as one of the globe’s leading lights. They were embarrassed again last week when rural Barrow County, about 35 miles northeast of Atlanta, decided that it did not want the Somali track and field team training within its borders.

Although Barrow County Chamber of Commerce officials said the primary reason was financial, the sentiment also was expressed that the team would not be welcome because of the hostile treatment U.S. military forces received in Somalia when they went there in 1992 to neutralize the war lords.

So much for Southern hospitality.

The criticism has been even more pointed than when another nearby community, Cobb County, passed an anti-gay ordinance, leading the Olympic organizing committee to remove the volleyball competition from there.

“Next, they’ll probably want a ban on anyone whose state fought against the Confederacy,” USA Today columnist Tom Weir wrote.

“It seems not in keeping with what the Olympics is all about,” International Olympic Committee Vice President Richard Pound of Canada said.

The Somalis had been assigned to Barrow County by the Olympic Training Alliance, a division of Georgia’s Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism.

*

The inspiration for Nike’s “Just Do It” attitude, which later became a monster marketing campaign, was tempestuous Steve Prefontaine, who held every U.S. middle distance running record between 2,000 meters and 10,000 meters before his death at age 24 in an automobile accident 20 years ago.

As a tribute to him, Nike and promoter Tom Jordan have put together a field for next Sunday’s meet at Eugene, Ore., the Prefontaine Classic, that promises to be the best in the country this year outside of the June 14-18 U.S. championships at Sacramento. Among those tentatively committed are Sergei Bubka, Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Maria Mutola, Gail Devers and Quincy Watts.

The meet will be televised by CBS, along with a Prefontaine documentary, “Fire on the Track.”

*

Eleven years after she upset Mary Slaney in the 1,500 meters of the Olympic trials at the Coliseum, Ruth Wysocki, 38, has the world’s second-best 1,500-meter time this year, 4:11.15. “I’m just out there having fun,” she says. . . . According to Runner’s World, Ireland’s world indoor 3,000-meter champion, Frank O’Mara, helped deliver his son in January. Because his wife Patty’s delivery was so smooth and because doctors were engrossed in a “Seinfeld” episode on television, O’Mara took the baby from the womb, handed him to Patty and cut the umbilical cord. . . . Perhaps he will be on call for South Africa’s Zola Budd-Pieterse, who is expecting for the first time in October. She believes she has at least one more competitive race in her, perhaps a marathon.

*

Perhaps the most disappointed player among those cut last week from the U.S. women’s basketball team that will be together for the next year in preparation for the 1996 Summer Olympics was Val Whiting, formerly of Stanford. She had postponed admission into medical school at UC San Francisco for a chance to play, costing her $30,000 in scholarships. . . . Two players who made the team, Katrina McClain and Teresa Edwards, gave up lucrative contracts in Europe to play for the $50,000 salary from USA Basketball. . . . Former USC player Lisa Leslie, who also made the team, believes it will create interest among girls. “I never knew a woman who played the sport when I was a young girl,” she said. “Even though Cheryl Miller was at USC, I had never seen her play. So I just kind of chose a local guy, James Worthy, as my idol.”

*

Atlanta’s organizing committee has designated an official anti-theft device--the special edition “Olympic Games Club.” . . . We have not heard the last of Dennis Conner. He is considering competing in the Soling class of the yachting competition at Atlanta.