REPORT FROM LONDON: PART 2

by Turk Murdock, European Correspondent at Large

(Picture: Sydney 2000 Olympics: American manager Tommy Lasorda can’t hold back the tears after watching the United States beat Cuba for the gold medal in baseball. At his right is Rod Dedeaux, who managed the U.S. Olympic baseball team in 1984.)

MAY 3: LONDON, CROMWELL CROWN HOTEL4, 139-141 Cromwell Road, South Kensington

The packet given to me by the Cylon (“Cylons” were the race of robots and artificial life forms featured in the
aforementioned Battlestar Galactica series) at the IOC Press Office did not contain passes or credentials for Olympic Baseball and Softball because there is no Olympic Baseball and Softball in the London Olympics of 2012.  As I riff through the pages she gave me, I see that they are documents, press releases and news reports from the 2005 meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Singapore.  I read that on the seventh of July, 2005 the IOC, in a direct bitch-slap to the United States of America, stripped baseball and softball of their status as officially sanctioned Olympic sports, eventually replacing them with golf and rugby sevens.

The IOC cited a variety of reasons, most aimed directly at U.S. MLB, and each more flimsy and insulting than the last: Pro ballplayers not allowed to compete; ungoverned use of steroids and other illegal performance enhancers; lack of international interest; Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice; etc. etc. et-fucking-ceter.  This was the first removal of a sport since polo was taken out of the 1936 Olympics, for chrissakes.  So 101 years after baseball made its first appearance at the Olympics in 1904 (baseball was played as an exhibition sport at the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis), America’s pastime was spat on and kicked out the door although both sports would be played in Beijing in 2008.

The thing that chills me, though, is that there is no way I would not know this; that I could not know this.  But I did not.  I consider the possibility of post-traumatic memory loss [Editor’s Note: There are reports that Mr. Murdock was seriously injured in the London transport bombings which also occurred on July 7, 2005, however there is no direct evidence to support these claims.] or even a slip into some parallel dimension but, whatever - I know that in my world, Olympic baseball still exists. And thus it follows that this is not my world - but of course the question remains, was it ever? 

So here’s to the Olympic ballplayers and medal winners from Cuba and Japan, Taipei, Australia and South Korea, and to the good men and women of amateur and professional softball and baseball in the United States of America.  No parades and flags and podiums and anthems and medals for you this time around because the world needs golf and the world needs rugby sevens and I need a stiff drink.