It’s Not a Job for Amateurs

A human rights group, Indict, has asked the International Olympic Committee to expel Iraq because Saddam Hussein’s eldest son Odai, who presides over the country’s Olympic committee, allegedly tortures and imprisons athletes who displease him.

According to Indict, young Hussein once ordered a group of track and field athletes to crawl on freshly poured asphalt while being beaten and then commanded some to jump off a bridge.

If this is true -- perhaps Hans Blix could investigate -- it is good news for the U.S. Olympic Committee. In comparison, its crimes against Olympic ideals are petty.

Otherwise, there is no good news for the USOC.

In recent weeks, the USOC’s chief executive has been accused of an ethics violation; five officials resigned because he’d been cleared after an in-house investigation; seven officers -- declaring themselves the “top leadership” of the USOC, as if they were in Venezuela -- have demanded that the president resign; and a major sponsor has threatened to cancel a $10-million contract by invoking a morals clause.

The situation is spinning out of control so rapidly that USOC officials actually welcome congressional intervention.

They will be obliged, starting today with a hearing on Capitol Hill before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Presiding is John McCain (R-Ariz.), the no-nonsense senator who has attempted to clean up professional boxing and has made progress with passage of the Muhammad Ali Reform Act.

But now he takes on a real challenge.

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War drums beat along the Potomac; terrorists plot against us; the economy is sluggish.

One can only hope that USOC officials are at least embarrassed that senators believe it necessary to take time from more important agendas. Then again, schoolteachers mandated to educate our youth sometimes have to avert attention from that responsibility to break up schoolyard fights.

On the surface, that is what we have here, a power struggle between the USOC’s very well-paid chief executive, Lloyd Ward, and the USOC’s volunteer president, Marty Mankamyer.

Mankamyer, a 69-year-old self-proclaimed soccer mom, seems to grasp the absurdity of the situation. “We may appear to be in costume sometimes,” she said recently. “But it’s really a great organization.”

Yet, according to the other officers, also volunteers, Mankamyer has created the rupture by being too aggressive in attempts to prejudice the membership against Ward.

That’s possible, although, as long as she hasn’t been slanderous or libelous, it hardly seems like an impeachable offense. If she doesn’t believe Ward is right for the job, it’s her duty to try to have him replaced. That’s leadership.

The genesis of the rift between Mankamyer and Ward isn’t clear, but it became public last year during the debate over whether Ward should resign his membership from Augusta National Golf Club. You can argue reasonably on constitutional and ethical grounds about men and their associations with a private club that has no women members.

But it is clear that Olympic officials should not be members of Augusta National.

Olympic ideals and the club’s history of exclusivity have clashed before. Before the 1996 Summer Games, Atlanta organizers tried to persuade the IOC to admit golf to the program and stage the event at Augusta. That proposal quickly withered after IOC leaders were informed of the club’s segregationist past.

Ward’s membership, along with that of other African Americans, was meant to right that wrong. Then he found himself embroiled in the controversy because he, as chief executive of an organization committed to equal opportunity for women, belongs to a club that isn’t.

Ward’s response, that he is working from within the club on behalf of women, satisfied the USOC’s executive board at a hearing in November, but it did not constitute leadership.

Neither did his response to the most recent controversy over whether his efforts on behalf of a company connected to his brother to acquire a lucrative Pan American Games contract created a conflict of interest. No deal was consummated. Ward, cleared of serious violations by the executive committee, admits only to an error in judgment. But then he complains that Mankamyer and Pat Rodgers, a USOC ethics officer who has resigned, knew that he was on the verge of committing an ethical breach and failed to warn him.

A 54-year-old veteran of the corporate world with experience at Maytag, Frito-Lay and PepsiCo becomes chief executive of the Olympic committee and has to be warned not to use that position to help financially benefit a company listing his brother as president?

Please. Ward should resign.

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The essential problem with the USOC, the one that Congress must eventually address, predates Ward’s involvement by almost 20 years.

It’s Peter Ueberroth’s fault.

Not long after Congress passed the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which created the unwieldy structure of volunteers and a paid staff to oversee the U.S. Olympic movement, Ueberroth, as president of the organizing committee for the L.A. Summer Olympics, took amateurs out of the Games.

Benefiting from his marketing and sponsorship skills, the L.A. Games generated a huge financial surplus. They also taught the IOC and, by extension, the USOC how to make money, so much that they even felt obligated to let the athletes share in it.

The USOC now has a four-year budget of $500 million.

But even though the USOC has evolved into a big business, the officers who still largely steer its course -- the “top leadership” -- are volunteers. The overwhelming majority are dedicated to the athletes and the movement, but they do not have the time, and, in too many cases, the experience or expertise required.

An example: The national governing bodies responsible for the U.S. Olympic sports have similar leadership structures. In 1994, the volunteers on the U.S. Figure Skating Assn.’s public relations committee criticized the paid public relations staff for not “containing” the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan scandal. It was like criticizing the National Weather Service for not containing a hurricane.

Now might not be perfect timing because of other priorities, but Congress eventually must create a system that gives the USOC more professional leadership. (And then serve as a watchdog to make sure that the right leadership is in place.)

That was a move the USOC sought to make itself in recent years, but that plan has been subverted by the type of conflicts that boiled over with Ward and Mankamyer.

It will require Congress to take the amateurs out of the Amateur Sports Act.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.