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Salt Lake City wanted to put itself on the world map with the 2002 Winter Olympics. The games are still three years away, but the Utah capital has already succeeded in a big way -- pick up a newspaper from just about anywhere, and the City of the Saints is on the front page.
This publicity, though, isn't quite what the movers and shakers had in mind when they were awarded the games by the International Olympic Committee.
Instead of gushy prose and glowing images of a progressive high-tech world-class urban mecca set amid some of the world's finest powdered slopes, the coverage has focused on bribery, corruption and prostitution.
But there's another scandal. US West, the Baby Bell that provides local telephone service to much of the Mountain West, recently announced it would make its promised $5 million donation to the Salt Lake Olympics.
US West is a monopoly. It doesn't need feel-good institutional advertising in order to attract business. For that matter, in recent years it has had more business than it could handle, forcing people to wait months to get new telephones, all because US West didn't invest enough in expanding its capacity.
Here's a company that says it can't afford to provide the modern telephone service it heavily promotes -- features like call-waiting, caller ID and distinctive ringing -- to its rural customers. But US West can still spend $5 million just to put the five intertwined Olympic rings on its billing envelopes?
Now, there's a scandal: A monopoly extracts money from its customers and squanders that money on some promoters who use it for, among other things, hiring whores for visiting royalty. Meanwhile, many of the monopoly's customers desperately need better service that could be provided by the money they're forced to spend with US West. This is a scandal that affects all of us every day, and yet our sports-mad mainstream media ignore it.
In Utah's neighbor state to the east, Colorado voters in 1972 had the good sense to expel the 1976 Winter Olympics. That was the last time Colorado and its cheerleader media exhibited any sense about big-time sports.
The best-paid person on the state payroll in Colorado is not the governor, nor indeed anyone with real responsibilities for health, safety or education. It is Gary Barnett, recently hired as head football coach at the University of Colorado for about $1 million a year.
Ask an athletic booster why this is so, and you'll hear that wealthy alumni are more likely to donate to the college when it has a winning football team.
In other words, this institution graduates people, presumably educated people, who don't care about Nobel laureates or MacArthur Genius Grant recipients. All they care about is the football team's record.
Now there's a scandal that cries out for investigation -- why are people with such obvious mental deficiencies being issued diplomas at all? Even the close-cover-before-striking institutes of mail-order refrigeration technology probably have higher standards than that.
But the Denver media will never raise that question -- they're too busy jumping on the Bronco bandwagon.
While there's an impeachment in Washington and a new governor in Colorado selling corporate sponsorships for his inauguration, Denver's newspapers put their energy into special sections of Bronco lore.
The TV stations pre-empt regular programming to run
specials about the Broncos -- just about the only time they
ever do any local production beyond the regular newscasts.
They send their anchors to Miami, and join with the
newspapers in sponsoring parades and pep-rallies while
issuing juvenile taunts to other cities: We're going to
the Super Bowl and you aren't.
Denver has trouble sheltering its homeless, but it has no trouble coming up with $250 million to build a new stadium for the Broncos.
That seems scandalous, just like the CU focus on football, just like US West wasting the money it extracted from us.
Perhaps other parts of the country can handle big-time sports in an appropriate way. But in this vast and empty time zone, we just get starstruck and lose all sense of priority. Our institutions, from utility regulation to higher education to mainstream media, are not strong enough to keep from getting overwhelmed by sports mania.
Not that we should give up sports altogether. We could stick to our own pursuits -- rodeo, river-running, pack-burro racing, rock-drilling, hang-gliding, ice-climbing -- that sort of thing.
We can handle those. We can't handle the world-class stuff, which overwhelms us and our institutions. Let's get rid of them as quickly as we can, and if a few fools start agitating for Olympic glory, Top Ten college teams or subsidized pro football -- they're welcome to move to some place that can accommodate their follies. The West can't.
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