Bum Steers in ‘Bumfuzzled’ Atlanta

I suppose the cigarette guy gets my vote for most valuable Olympian so far. He solved this Atlanta “organization”--ha!--insanity better than anybody.

He was on a bus, moving through downtown. The bus passed the building where the guy wanted to get off. At the stoplight, however, the driver said she could not open the door. Her orders were to proceed to an authorized Olympic drop-off point, where the passenger could then find a bus that would take him back to the very building she was now passing.

Exasperated, the guy asked: “What would you do if I lit up a cigarette?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“If I lit a cigarette and refused to put it out, would you kick me off this bus?”

“Yes, I would,” the driver said.

He lit the cigarette.

She let him off.

This is my eighth Olympic Games, and the eighth-best organized. Sarajevo, Seoul, Barcelona . . . all models of efficiency compared to this, what some of us have taken to calling the Lost Continent of Atlanta.

The people here, they’re pleasant, they’re patient, they are trying hard. But they are in farther over their heads than King Neptune and his trident. I can’t remember anyone from Georgia this confused since Butterfly McQueen. It’s not that they don’t give a damn. Frankly, they just don’t know a damn.

Technical malfunction. Transportation breakdown. Ticket snafu. You name it, Atlanta’s had it. I’m surprised Muhammad Ali didn’t get scorched by the torch.

Atlanta was every bit as ready for the Olympics as America was for New Coke. I half-expect to catch a bus to canoe/kayak and end up in Connecticut. Before these Olympics are over, some poor horse is going to drown, because an Atlanta volunteer is going to mistakenly assign him to the water polo.

After the mayor of Atlanta groused that critics of the Olympic organizers should be taken out to the shooting competition and shot, I made the half-serious argument that nobody could get out to the shooting competition. Well, sure enough, the bus to the Wolf Creek shooting complex broke down Monday, stranding dozens of passengers.

No wonder graffiti in a women’s washroom at the athletes’ village reads: “Can We Go Back to Barcelona?”

Miss Daisy didn’t have this much trouble getting driven.

Called on the carpet by International Olympic Committee members, Atlanta officials vowed Monday to identify and correct their many shortcomings, particularly in transportation and technology. “I don’t know the costs,” Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) press chief Bob Brennan said Monday. “They are irrelevant. We will fix it.”

Mayor William Campbell assured the IOC personally Monday that the city is working with ACOG to resolve its traffic and transport difficulties, according to Brennan. Street closures and other measures have begun in response to complaints from individuals such as British rower Steven Redgrave, who, Brennan said, “was very forceful in expressing his displeasure with the transportation arrangements.”

If it isn’t the Croatia basketball team waiting three hours for its bus after a game, it’s the defending gold medalist in judo getting disqualified for missing his weigh-in because he was taken to the wrong place. If it isn’t a Canadian fencer arriving minutes before his match because his bus driver got lost, it’s a 4:45 a.m. bus to the Olympic softball competition in Columbus, Ga., never showing up at all.

The late, much-loved Southern author Lewis Grizzard’s word for confusion was being “bumfuzzled.”

Atlanta is totally bumfuzzled.

I reckon I knew this was going to be a loopy Olympics when I walked right into the stadium for the opening ceremonies, with at least a hundred others, without passing through a working metal detector or having my very large satchel searched. (Not that anyone important was inside the stadium, except, oh, President Clinton, the first lady, the first daughter, Princess Anne, Prince Albert, Imelda Marcos, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Shaquille O’Neal . . .)

Guess we didn’t look like terrorists.

Look, Atlanta is a fine town, and the Olympic Games, as any Los Angeleno can tell you, are a monster that tramples all over you like Godzilla on a Tokyo subway. But so far, these make the L.A. Olympics look as wild and unruly as a bingo game in a church basement.

You should see the MARTA train platforms. I’ve seen more orderly cattle stampedes. An electric transformer caught fire Monday, stalling a train at the Buckhead station. That left Buckhead bumfuzzled. Commuters are crushing one another like a soccer stadium riot. Arrows and signs all over town read: “To MARTA.” A gag going around Atlanta is that somewhere there is a woman, sitting in a rocking chair, whittling a stick, doing nothing. “Hi, y’all,” she will say if you meet her. “I’m Marta.”

Bus drivers are quitting. Guides were added Monday to help them find their way. The bus to the gymnastics broke down. The bus to the swimming broke down. You couldn’t even go to the shooting to get put out of your misery. Chief dispatcher of the Atlanta transit system is apparently a direct descendant of Ralph Kramden. The only bus having a good week is the one who owns the Lakers.

What’s the old joke? “He’s so stupid, he had his gold medal bronzed?”

Well, any day now:

* Instead of the German national anthem, they will accidentally play the theme from “Hogan’s Heroes.”

* A diver will spring off the board, only to hear: “Wait! We forgot to fill the . . .! “

* Someone asking for Wolf Creek is going to be taken to Wolf Blitzer.

* A man claiming to be Hungarian is going to be fed.

* The “Info ‘96” computer system is going to print out results from the Athens Olympics of 1896.

I laughed a few weeks ago when a caller from New Mexico was told that tickets to foreign countries were not yet available. It was hilarious when professional comedian Bob Romano opened an “Unofficial Consulate of New Mexico” at his house, asking everyone to sign a petition endorsing New Mexico for statehood.

But it isn’t funny anymore. Atlanta’s Olympic organization, an oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one, is being called “the worst ever” by members of the international committee. NBC, with millions invested, is going national with reports of ticket trouble, transport trouble, athletes anxious that they won’t get to their events, merchants doing no business because nobody can get to their stores.

One official issued a statement Monday on why there was so much difficulty issuing statements. It took him eight hours to issue his statement.

During a Dream Team basketball game, the electricity went out. Pleas over the public address system to spectators at the gymnastics competition not to use flashbulbs have gone unheeded, because the trilevel dome is too large for ushers to maintain order. An ambulance dispatched to the Georgia World Congress Center to aid an injured judo athlete broke down en route, and the second ambulance couldn’t get through security.

Volunteer workers, meantime, don’t know (as Dolly Parton once said) “whether to scratch their watch or wind their butt.”

At the water polo, one was asked where the entrance was.

“Oh, good,” he replied. “Finally, a question I can answer.”

A technician at the Main Press Center went to a shipping dock to ask if his fax machine had arrived. The worker handed him a thin 10-by-14 envelope and asked: “Is this it?”

A photographer was told a news conference was full but that it was being shown on TV. He held up his equipment and said: “See this? We call this a camera.”

A newspaper editor made an appointment to see former L.A. Olympic chief Peter Ueberroth at a hotel. A hotel guard said: “Sorry, no media.”

“But it’s a hotel,” the editor said. “What if I wasn’t wearing my media credential?”

“We know you now,” the guard said.

And never mind the media. This could be the first Olympics in history to deny access to the athletes.

When a leader from the U.S. fencing team found out that alternate Donna Stone was not admitted to the competition, even though her name was on the list, he couldn’t believe it. “What do they think we’re going to do?” team captain Carl Borack of Los Angeles asked. “Give them the names of terrorists?”

Team officials from South Korea and Hungary have complained about their athletes’ accommodations. College students, promised work, have migrated back home by the thousands, dismayed and unpaid. An American basketball official said the team cannot get halftime statistics or postgame results because the workers are too busy trying to get Dream Team players to pose for a photo.

I hope Atlanta can straighten out its act.

Otherwise, maybe the second week of the Olympics could be moved to Athens, Greece. I hear they know how to run one over there.