A Joyous Event; Sports In Its Purest Form Special Olympics A Festival That Offers A Reason To Cheer

There actually were tennis matches played this week in which no players stormed off the court and no umpires were assaulted. Honest, there were.

There were ballgames in which the players ran out every ground ball. There were basketball games in which all the players sat in the timeout huddle and listened to the coach.

There were track events in which the winners didn’t have to take a drug test and the losers didn’t file a protest. There was athletic competition between teams from different nations, but there was no political subtext.

The Special Olympics World Games, a nine-day festival for athletes with mental retardation, is a joyous event because it is sports in its purest form. It is about doing your best and having fun, regardless of the score.

While baseball owners and players choke on their greed, while NBA millionaires and their agents rail against the players’ union, while more fans turn away from sports in disgust, the Special Olympics offer reason to cheer. It sounds trite, but it is true.

It is impossible to attend the World Games, which drew 7,200 athletes from 140 nations, and not be moved.

You cannot forget the sight of Panama’s Thomas Murray playing basketball on one leg. Murray, 21, lost his left leg at the hip when he was struck by a train at age 7. He uses crutches off the court, but he leaves them on the bench when he plays ball. Still, Murray gets up and down the floor with everyone else.

Walk past the bocce courts and you see a South African athlete, who is black, hugging the coach, who is white. “Before this, the player wouldn’t let the coach touch her,” said team director Gerti Rich, noting the lingering effect of apartheid. “Now when the athlete does well, she’ll hug the coach. A lot of barriers are coming down.”

The same applies to public ignorance about retardation. At the 11 unified sports, where athletes with mental retardation play on teams with “partners” who are not retarded, many spectators could not distinguish one from the other. Especially in softball, the players looked like a bunch of guys just having fun.

There were no different rules, no fourth or fifth strikes for the “special needs” athletes, no charity errors allowing runners to score. It was straight-up, everybody-bats-and-fields, fast-pitch softball. The idea was to show the two groups, and those watching, that they weren’t so different after all.

One tour of the venues makes you realize how little you knew about mental retardation. It is not a disease, nor is it a mental illness, and its severity ranges from mild to profound. Ninety percent of the 7.5 million people in the U.S. with mental retardation fall into the “mild” category and in many respects are indistinguishable from the rest of society.

It is stunning the first time you see a Special Olympics athlete run the 100 meters in 11 seconds flat, as Lee Morrison of North Carolina did this week. Or when you see powerlifter Thomas Edmond, a 165-pounder from Louisiana, hoist 450 pounds on his shoulders and dead-lift 605 pounds.

Lowell Weicker, the former governor of Connecticut, talked about going to a soccer game and seeing players heading the ball into the net and scissor-kicking the ball over their heads, skills you normally associate with a World Cup match.

Said Weicker: “It strikes home when you realize that only 30 years ago, most of these people would have been in the corner of an institution somewhere.”

The Olympic ideal of honest competition and pride in participation still exists here. The Olympic Games lost this quality years ago. That’s not to say these athletes don’t want to win. They do, but they do not define this experience on a sliding scale of gold, silver and bronze.

A gymnast who struggles to do one handstand gets as much applause as one who does a backflip from the uneven bars. The New Mexico basketball team, made up of Navajo Indians, still was hustling in the final minute of a 47-point loss to the Dominican Republic. These games are about striving.

Example: Loretta Claiborne of York, Pa. Now 41, she was born blind in one eye and did not walk until she was 4. Doctors urged her mother to put her in an institution, but she refused, even though Loretta had to repeat both first and second grades.

Surgery restored the sight in Loretta’s eye, and in high school, she discovered she had a gift for running. Today, she is an accomplished marathon runner with 25 races to her credit, including a 3:03 finish in the 1982 Boston Marathon.

It was Claiborne’s idea to add the marathon to the Special Olympics World Games this year, although she will not compete because of a nonmalignant stomach tumor. She signed up for bowling instead and averaged 165 for her first three games.

Claiborne has a fourth-degree black belt in karate and is fluent in Russian and Spanish. At the opening ceremony Saturday, she was selected to introduce President Clinton to a crowd of 70,000 at Yale Bowl, an honor which, she said, sent chills down her spine.

However, Team Pennsylvania director Jane Lewis said Claiborne does not seek personal attention. “She doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal,” Lewis said. “She just wants people to know our athletes are the same as everyone else.”