It was friday night at the University of Utah football stadium, a place where over the years I must have covered at least a million Utah-Wyoming football games.
On deadline, I wrote and filed my column minutes after the event was over, packed up my word processor, looked at my watch and headed for the exit ? until I was stopped in mid-stride by the sight of seven people holding a press conference.
They included John Glenn, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Steven Spielberg, Cathy Freeman, Jean-Claude Killy and Jean-Michel Cousteau.
And it hit me.
Oh . . .
. . . that isn't the Wyoming coaching staff.
For seven years they've been coming, the Olympic Games, but it was the sight of the astronaut from America, the George Washington of Poland, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from South Africa, the man from California who made E.T. and Indiana Jones, the 400-meter pride of Australia, the on-the-edge French ski racer whose name is synonymous with Olympic skiing, and the son of the man who put his arms around the oceans, that brought it home for me.
Hold an Olympics and the world really does show up.
These seven ? plus legendary Japanese ski jumper Kazuyoshi Funaki ? came to Salt Lake to carry the five-ring Olympic flag during the opening ceremonies from one corner of Rice-Eccles Olympic Stadium to the flag pole in the other corner. That was it. The epitome of light, and heavy, lifting. On the ends and middle of that flag, they represented the five land masses designated by the interlocking Olympic rings ? Asia (Funaki), the Americas (Glenn), Europe (Walesa), Africa (Tutu) and Oceania (Freeman) ? and the three pillars of the Olympic movement ? sport (Killy), culture (Spielberg) and the environment (Cousteau, who has picked up where his father left off). But more than that, they personified the notion that the Olympic Games, for all their excess, greed and road closures, provide a place for the world to get together. Now, maybe more than ever.
What more proof could you want?
I wanted to shout out, "What are you all doing for dinner?"
I was not alone. Even the seven people on the stage seemed to realize that there were more than a few stories this group could tell long into the night. Of cold nights in Warsaw, of hot nights in Johannesburg, of dark nights in the Pacific; what it feels like orbiting the earth in a rocket, what it feels like hurtling down a piste at 80 miles an hour, how exactly "Schindler's List" came to life.
Cathy Freeman, the Aboriginal woman who brought her homeland of Australia to a standstill 18 months ago at the Sydney Games during the time it took her to win her gold medal, walked up to the press conference microphone and said, "My fantasy life continues." She looked over at Spielberg ? Spielberg! ? and said she couldn't believe that not only had she just carried the Olympic flag with him, but that he'd graciously insisted ? ever the director ? that she take her turn ahead of him at the press conference, which of course she did.
Moments earlier, out on the stadium floor, 17-year-old American figure skater Sasha Cohen had found herself in a similar experience as Cathy Freeman when she turned in the crowd and found herself standing next to George W. Bush, president of the United States, who had decided to declare the 19th Olympic Winter Games open while mingling with the U.S. Olympic Team.
Sasha did what came naturally to a teenager in the cell phone age. She reached for her phone and speed-dialed home.
Mom, it's him!
Then she put the President of the United States on the phone.
It was the kind of story they might not believe back home without hard, solid proof.
It's the Olympics. That's how it is. Walk around the corner and you never know who you'll bump into. Or who will bump into you.
Lee Benson's column runs daily during the Olympics. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.