Those Good Old-Time Olympics

(Jason Reed -- Reuters)

The crowd went wild! A writer named Diodorus described the spectators cheering the battle, "impartially applauding the [valiant] deeds performed on both sides."

These days, if an army invaded the Olympics, you young whippersnappers would probably run like rabbits. But in the old days, there wasn't much difference between sports and war. If you don't believe me, ask Michael B. Poliakoff, the guy who wrote "Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture."

"Sport provided for the Greeks a place to show all the individual courage and fortitude that were used in warfare," Poliakoff says. "It gave people a circumscribed arena for all those passions."

Sure, we enjoyed footraces, discus-throwing, javelin-tossing and all that stuff, but we really liked the "combat sports" -- wrestling, boxing and, of course, pankration, which Poliakoff calls "an opportunity to re-create the dynamic world of one-on-one combat."

Your modern Olympics don't have pankration and your boxing is a joke. You've got these wimpy, so-called boxers fighting with helmets on their heads and pillows on their hands. They waltz around for a couple minutes, slapping each other with the pillows, then they sit down and rest. You call that boxing? Phooey!

Back in the ancient days, the boxers wore leather straps on their hands to cut up their opponent's face. And there were no rounds, no rest periods; they just kept fighting until somebody collapsed or quit. Look at the paintings of boxers on the ancient vases: They've got cauliflower ears and broken noses with blood flowing out. We liked that. It showed that the guys were really giving their all.

The chariot race was practically a combat sport, too. You should have seen it! What a spectacle! Forty chariots, each pulled by four horses, going like crazy around the hippodrome, crashing into each other, sending the drivers flying! It was better than NASCAR.

Sophocles, the great playwright, described one of those Olympic chariot crashes: "As the crowd saw the driver somersault, there rose a wail of pity for the youth, as he bounced onto the ground, then flung head over heels into the sky. When his companions caught the runaway team and freed the bloodstained corpse from his rig, he was disfigured and marred past the recognition of his best friend."

Can anything in your modern Olympics match it?

Roughing It

Have you seen the TV people yapping about the preparations for the 2004 Olympics? What a joke! They're whining like babies: Will the stadium roof be done in time? What can be done about the traffic jams? Will there be enough hotel rooms?

You gotta be kidding. A roof on the stadium? Back in the old days, they didn't even have seats. We stood in the hot sun all day and we were thrilled to do it because, hey, it was the Olympics!

Traffic jams? Back in the old days, we walked to Olympia. That's 210 miles from Athens.

We didn't whine about it; we just put one foot in front of the other, covering about 15 miles a day. After a week, you got to Corinth, which had great bars and a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, where hookers plied their trade. That made for a nice little respite, particularly since we didn't have our wives with us.

Married women weren't allowed at the Olympics. If you wanted to bring your teenage daughter so you could match her up with a nice handsome athlete, that was fine. But married women were barred. Now that I think of it, that was part of the fun: Guys like to get away from their wives. How else can you explain the enduring appeal of things like wars and the Wednesday night lodge meetings of the Loyal Order of Moose?