IT WAS deja vu all over again Saturday as an old flame was rekindled in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Olympic Games of '84 may be a 12-year-old memory, and Atlanta may be the new Olympic City, and Al Davis may have dug up the track, but when the Greeks sent their light to America for the Games of '96, they sent it here first.
The official Olympic flame - direct from a temple in Olympia, Greece - arrived inside a lantern at Los Angeles International Airport early Saturday morning. By a stroke of luck, it did not go from there to a baggage carousel in Des Moines, but made it to a waiting helicopter for a short hop to the Coliseum, site of both the 1984 and 1932 Olympic Games.Rafer Johnson, an Olympic gold medalist in 1960 and the man who lit the Los Angeles Olympic cauldron in 1984, touched his Olympic torch to the Greek lantern and lapped the stadium floor to begin a 15,000-mile torch relay that will deposit that very same flame - if luck holds - in the Atlanta Olympic cauldron on July 19, the day the Centennial Olympic Games begin in the Olympic Stadium there.
Johnson passed the flame off to Gina Tillman, the granddaughter of the late great Olympian, Jesse Owens. It was Tillman who, in the 1984 opening ceremonies, brought the flame into the Coliseum and passed it off to Johnson for his anchor leg.
So, as all of Hollywood smiled, the symmetry had come full circle.
Ten-thousand torchbearers are scheduled to participate in the torch's 84-day, 42-state journey, including Garth Brooks, Shaquille O'Neal and (gasp!) Jimmy Carter, the boycotting President whose last Olympic act was in 1980 when he tried to douse the flame for good.
But brotherhood is nothing if not forgiving, and the torch relay is definitely about brotherhood. More than half of the torchbearers are "community heroes," each one nominated anonymously by admirers. Good people who deserve praise and, probably, a raise - but for now, carrying the torch will have to do.
People like Father Greg Boyle, who was No. 40 on the procession parade Saturday, taking the torch at Third and Soto and carrying it half-a-kilometer (about three-tenths of a mile) to First and Chicago.
"I did what I set out to do. I didn't trip, fall, or set my beard on fire," said Father Greg, looking pleased with himself.
Boyle is a Catholic priest who works with gang members in Boyle Heights, no relation, hard by downtown L.A. "This my barrio, the poorest area in the city," he said, with neither bragging nor pity in his voice, just fact.
Although he has no idea who nominated him as a community hero (80 torchbearers were selected from more than 2,500 nominations in Los Angeles alone) he said he was glad to carry the torch past the kids he daily tries to reach. He saw many of them watching him in Saturday's noonday sun, looking out from under the rims of their Homeboy Industry hats, one of the homespun ghetto projects Boyle oversees. They saw him take the torch from Danny Hernandez, another community hero who directs the nearby Hollenbeck Park Youth Center, and they saw Hernandez take it from Paul Gonzales, the gold-medal winning Olympic boxer (light flyweight, 1984) who grew up in this very barrio.
Boyle, who's been around, remembered Gonzales as "a gang member, a real knucklehead for a while."
But he fought his way out, and so - why not? - can those who sat and watched the Olympic torch go by on Saturday.
"I was more emotional than I thought I would be," said Boyle. "This really brought people together."
The ancient Greeks - who used the Olympics as an excuse to interrupt wars and usher in a period, however brief, of brotherhood and peace - would be happy to hear that.
Boyle turned and headed back up Soto to the Dolores Mission School, where the torch - his torch - will be put on display in the lobby. Each torchbearer could buy his or her torch for $275 (something the Greeks probably never considered) and several Boyle Heights people, no doubt including many of those who nominated him, chipped in so Boyle could buy his - and give it to the school. There the torch will sit - until the Atlanta Games are over or until someone steals it, hopefully the former. And at the Hollenbeck Park Youth Center, Hernandez's torch will do the same.
Reminders of a Saturday morning when the Olympic flame came through the barrio and ushered in a period, however brief, of brotherhood and peace.