Money can spoil Olympic humility

Brian Till

Sunday, Aug. 24, 2008 | 2 a.m.

After capturing his eighth gold medal a week ago Saturday night, Michael Phelps told a gaggle of journalists that he looked forward to “just sitting, not moving.” The same could not be said of Phelps’ agent, Peter Carlisle, who’s been hustling his client’s name to all interested corporate branders.

As the Beijing Games wind down, I’d like to reflect on the fleeting nature of Olympic celebrity. As the media swirl about how much the “Phelps brand” might be worth, we should recognize — and more important celebrate — the humility with which most Olympians return home.

We’ve made celebrity — including athletic greatness — into a commodity: If you have a recognizable name and face, you’re turned into a stock — evaluated and traded on a daily basis. People’s value becomes leveraged — whom we like and whom we hate, whose careers are on an upswing and whose lives are careering out of control. We consult our friends and hairstylists, blogs and checkout line magazines — they become our stockbrokers, counseling us: whom to cheer and whom to jeer, where to go long with our allegiance and where to sell short. Who’s a good parent, and whose legs have gotten fat. We assess every measure of these people.

But our Olympians defy the machine. They carry headlines and morning talk show banter alongside rock stars and Hollywood’s finest, fitting between top-tier politicians and the biggest-name pro athletes. But then we let them slip away, and I think that’s great.

There’s a dignity to fading away, to having served flag and nation and then retiring quietly. Indeed, Olympic fame seems to be the only genre of celebrity left that allows us to celebrate accomplishments without delving into personal lives and character flaws. Even reality stars have a tendency to remain in the public sphere, their personal lives drudged up as “TMZ” and blogs try to feed the seemingly insatiable American hunger for gossip and juice.

Along with Olympic talent comes a humility — a knowledge that in an Olympiad, they may very well be at home, surrounded by bills and chores, watching the Olympics on TV in an utterly normal life. And because of that, their successes are all the purer.

Before Phelps, great modern Olympians often found themselves with a cereal box cover and a fairly prolific speaking career — nothing on the order of wealth that even midlevel professional athletes might amass.

Phelps’ agent has boldly projected to The Wall Street Journal that he plans to turn Phelps’ eight gold medals into $100 million over his lifetime, and he might be able to do it. But I can’t say I’d like to see it happen.

Nielsen put NBC average viewership close to 30 million a night for the first week of the games. It’s truly an incredible phenomenon: to go from having a crowd the size of New York and Los Angeles combined, to complete anonymity just hours later. I hope it stays that way.

I don’t need my shortstop vetted like a vice presidential candidate, and I like that Olympic glory doesn’t coincide with tremendous financial gain or any of the obsession that comes with it. So to the fury of agents in Los Angeles and New York, trying to turn Beijing gold into booking fees and consultant’s cuts, I wish you no luck.

Our athletes’ faces will remain etched in our minds, even as their names and scores fade over time. The memory becomes of our own excitement; of their rookielike jubilation; of the most genuine and nationalistic of prides. They’ve been our heroes for a day; they’ve earned titles as best in United States and often best in the world, and they’ve made us all proud — do they need more than that?

Brian Till, one of the nation’s youngest syndicated columnists, writes for Creators Syndicate. He also is a research associate for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.