Signs of Trouble

It took decisive action and a dramatic announcement to do it, but catharsis finally came this week for this malaise-stricken community.

Yes, the NBA ended its lockout, meaning the beloved Utah Jazz will be running on the Delta Center hardwood again very soon.

In other news, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics blew out its two top-ranking officials in the wake of a bribery scandal that has painted Salt Lake City as the international capital of clueless naivete, gosh-darn gullibility and over-the-top zealotry.

As if that’s something any visiting NBA team didn’t already know.

It was some head-on collision, these two breaking stories--the return of the Jazz, the departure of SLOC President Frank Joklik and senior vice president Dave Johnson, all within a manic-depressive 48 hours.

It also served to underscore the severity of the growing pains now being endured by Salt Lake City as it struggles with a most daunting image makeover: from conservative, homogenous small-town-trapped-inside-a-big-city’s-body to pulsating can-do metropolis poised on the cutting edge of the new millennium.

On the front page of Thursday’s Salt Lake Tribune, dwarfing a wire-service story advancing the presidential impeachment trial, was a full-cover “NBA Tip-Off!” lockout settlement primer, providing answers to such need-to-know queries as “Will the Chicago Bulls play in Salt Lake City this season?”

(Answer: “Probably only in the NBA finals.”)

Beneath the primer, at the bottom of the page, was a story detailing the latest excesses in gift-giving by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee: “At least four firearms” given to International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch during the bid campaign to host the 2002 Winter Olympics.

This in addition to previous, and later, reports of SLOC handing out:

* Nearly $400,000 in tuition and athletic training expenses to 13 individuals, most of them from Africa, six of them relatives of IOC members, who vote to determine which cities will be anointed as a worthy Olympic host site.

* Free medical care--including cosmetic surgery, worth $28,000 all told--to three people with apparent IOC connections.

* Cash payments ranging from $5,000 to $70,000.

* Assistance in enabling an African IOC member to purchase a prime plot of Utah property for $60,000.

The steady stream of such disclosures has spawned a tourism boom in Utah, although not exactly the kind endorsed by the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. Salt Lake City now is crawling with investigators--the scandal has launched four investigations, conducted by the IOC, the SLOC board of ethics, the U.S. Olympic Committee and the Department of Justice--and reporters dispatched to cover the story.

Among the latest set of charges now being investigated: Whether prostitutes were enlisted to aid the IOC vote-recruitment process.

With the spires of the Mormon Temple towering in the background, many civic leaders are mortified by the findings. Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt, who pushed for the resignations of Joklik and Johnson, calls the conduct of the Salt Lake bid committee “repulsive and unacceptable.”

“It must be absolutely clear that the actions of a few do not reflect the values, moral expectations or standards of this community and state,” Leavitt said Friday after Joklik announced his resignation. “We deplore it, and we revolt at being associated with them.”

But Stephen Pace, a local anti-Olympics activist whose group, Utahns For Responsible Public Spending, has clashed with Salt Lake City leaders over the pursuit of the Games for the last 10 years, claims he is not surprised by the scandal.

“I opposed [the Games] because I thought it was a swindle from the get-go, pouring tax money into the thing,” Pace says. “I think if they want to have a big party and they pay for it themselves, that’s fine. I just opposed the tax money--to begin with.

“But as the thing moved along, the amount of lies that they’ve told and the corruption that has been obvious for years on this thing made me say that I think they ought to take these Games and shove it.

“I have changed my mind about one thing, however. I used to think everything that SLOC said during the campaign was a lie. But one thing they said really has proved to be the truth.

“And that was the promise they made over and over again--’The Olympics will bring Salt Lake City the kind of publicity money just can’t buy.’ ”

Voting IOC Members Targeted

The struggle currently underway for the heart and soul of Salt Lake City--buttoned-up versus progressive, quaint versus thoroughly post-modern--can be inspected firsthand at City Hall.

Just inside the pristinely maintained 19th century building, alongside the door that leads to the City Council’s offices, rests a remarkably lifelike wood carving of a yellow Labrador retriever. There it sits, hour after hour, untouched by the heavy daily foot traffic.

This would never play in Los Angeles or New York. Try the same thing there and by sundown, this fine specimen of a dog would be tagged from head to broken tail in graffiti.

Then, visible from the window of Mayor Deedee Corradini’s office, is the ongoing construction of a massive, multilevel structure.

“That’s the new hotel that will be the IOC headquarters,” Corradini proudly points out. When finished, it will be Salt Lake City’s only five-star hotel.

“We’re short of hotel rooms in the four- and five-star categories,” Corradini adds. “We’ve got lots of Hampton Inns and hotels all over the valley, but our last five-star hotel was the Hotel Utah, which went out of business many years ago. So we’ve desperately needed this.”

The same feeling accompanied Salt Lake City’s 27-year-long quest to capture the Olympic Games. Beginning in 1968, Salt Lake City bid and failed four times to secure the Games--most painfully in 1991, when it lost the election for the 1998 Winter Olympics to Nagano by four votes.

“Our bids go back to the ‘60s, when a group of business leaders decided that for economic development, we ought to make a go of it,” Corradini says. “But we were so unsophisticated at the time . . .

“We had a lot of growing to do and maturing to do in the process. So you had these sort of rag-tag bids and then these last two serious bids [for the 1998 and 2002 Games], with a lot of years in between.”

To those pursuing the Games, sophistication and maturation translated into learning from mistakes and making sure they didn’t happen again. In assessing the loss to Nagano in ‘91, bid committee officials determined the election swung on the votes of African IOC members, so those became the targets leading up to the 1995 election.

The bid committee’s game plan called for its own investigation into the likes and dislikes of IOC members--determining those whose votes could be influenced by gifts and special privileges. Johnson headed the project, with instructions to identify where the required majority of IOC votes were located.

“The message that got through was, ‘This is how it’s done, let’s not leave anything to chance,’ ” says Glenn Bailey, head of the Salt Lake Impact 2002 and Beyond Coalition.

When the election to award the 2002 Games was held in Budapest, Hungary, in 1995, Salt Lake City won in a landslide, 54 votes to 14 each for runners-up Ostersund, Sweden, and Sion, Switzerland.

The victory was excessive--and so, as it turns out, were the measures taken to achieve it.

“I don’t think civic-minded people anywhere like to have their names linked with the words ‘bribery’ and ‘scandal,’ ” says Mike Gorrell, Olympics writer for the Salt Lake Tribune. “I think it disgusted people here. And I say that even though most people know that this is the way business is done.

“What made matters worse was when the organizing committee tried to paint it as ‘humanitarian aid.’ It would’ve been better if they’d said, ‘Yeah, we did it, it’s how they play the game, we got caught.’ Then people here would be a lot more forgiving than when they hear, ‘Oh, we were just helping out poor Africans.’ ”

Bailey believes local residents “are embarrassed. After all the shenanigans that have gone on [with Olympic bidding] over the years, Salt Lake City is the one that gets tagged with the bribery scandal. There’s a feeling of, ‘We should’ve done better.’ ”

Especially Salt Lake City, given its standing as “The City of Saints,” the seat of power within the Mormon Church and reputed bastion of rectitude and morality.

Says Gorrell: “In both cases, Salt Lake City and the IOC, you have a city and a movement that espouse pure ideals, yet you’re talking about these ugly things. I think that’s why people around the country are interested in this story--the dichotomy between good and evil.”

Salt Lake City officials hope Friday’s purging of Joklik and Johnson is the first step in the restoration of the city’s reputation. But that is a reclamation project that could take some doing, now that images of under-the-table graft and freebies have replaced John Stockton and Karl Malone in the world’s eye.