It Turns Out, This Was Kind of Cool

My stay in Salt Lake City began in failure the day I arrived. I had always said that one of my professional goals was never to go to a Winter Olympics, and here I was. I always favored Summer Games because of the word “summer” in the title.

This time, the Olympic people had done me in by putting all that sliding and skating and sloshing and slushing one time zone away, so professional goals gave way to professional common sense.

And now that it is over, it wasn’t so bad. My voice should return from the pneumonia by mid-April and, for almost a month, I didn’t have to listen to Simers whimper about not having his own company limo because he’s such a big star now.

Usually, at these things, you have a couple of Olympic moments, the kind that rekindle your spirit and restore your faith in humanity and make little tears well up in your eyes.

I think NBC stole all those this time. My fire within was not lighted. My matches must have gotten wet.

Certainly, there were moments. The opening ceremony, even via TV in the press center, was amazing and moving. The moment of the Games may have been when they carried in the tattered flag from the World Trade Center.

You could hear nothing but the footsteps of the flag-carriers. It was powerful because of something few of the NBC announcers will ever learn: Silence is golden.

The nightly show you got at home was beautifully presented and packaged. NBC could squeeze a tear of emotion out of Hannibal Lecter.

Dick Ebersol, the NBC boss and Olympic genius, knows how to do this better than anyone and makes his company tons of money in the process.

I suspect people watching at home love all that overcoming odds and coming back from adversity and doing it for Mom (or Dad, or cousin Johnnie or Fido).

The ratings clearly show that. NBC has borrowed nicely for tone from the old ABC “Wide World of Sports,” making each telecast the Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat.

Down on the streets of Salt Lake, away from Bob Costas’ fireplace, it was more like the Thrill of Victory and the Agony of the Metal Detectors.

The only place you didn’t set off beeps here was the entrance to the men’s room and McDonald’s, where they would have been handy for cholesterol control.

We worked hard, chronicling the various ramblings of the French figure skating judge and the various whinings of the Russians, South Koreans, Lithuanians and Eric Heidens.

We did our best to figure out the nuances, such as what the bottom guy in doubles luge does, or whether you can buy one of those curling brooms at Home Depot.

Mary Carillo, one of the best things NBC has going for it these days, explained the doubles luge better than anybody when she speculated that it began as “a bar bet gone bad.”

Another good line came from Mike Moran, the manager of public relations for the U.S. Olympic Committee, in an interview about how things had changed now that the USOC and its national governing bodies have started working together for the betterment of the U.S. team.

“Before, they just thought of us as a big ATM machine,” Moran said.

Then there was my cab ride, from where a high percentage of all great Olympic moments come.

The cabby, age roughly 50, said he had it all figured out. He said he would be an athlete in the next Olympics.

No sweat, he said. Done deal.

“I’m gonna learn that curling stuff and then I’ll fly down to Puerto Rico and start a team,” he said.

And what background do you have for this? I asked.

“I’m a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern,” he said.

So there I was, speechless in Salt Lake City.