Well, at least nowadays we don’t have to push a sled up a frozen mountain.Franz Klammer, also known as the Kaiser, is a former alpine ski racer born in an Alpine farmer family in Austria. From what I read, that’s about the same odds that “actively managed mutual funds” actually beat their index benchmarks. However, apparently I would not have been alone – of the 100,000 who attempted to get there, only about 30,000-40,000 did so. Watching a reenactment of those brave/insane folks hiking it up Chilkoot Pass, then building their own boats to tackle the rapids to finally make it to Dawson “City” to try to find gold in the frozen ground, well, my wussiness was confirmed once again : I could never have done that. (While I was coughin’ up half a lung thanks to the respiratory illness that has ensnared at least half of the Wash metro area). Ironically, I watched the 3-night KLONDIKE miniseries last week on the Discovery channel. But I have lived my entire life below the Mason-Dixon line & fervently feel if one must leave her house for work when the temps are below 30, there should be HAZARD pay involved. I know, I know, 10 degrees is BALMY shorts-wearin’ weather for those hardy folks of MinneSOHta, the Dakotas & other frozen wastelands, er, fracking paradises. My pathetic excuse is that my brain has been frozen for the past friggin week. Not even the Super Bowl, though it was closing the gap.Įr, that’s “Franz” not “Hans” & his heir apparents. And back then, in a sports television universe that was not as fractured as it is today, nothing came close to approaching the Games in magnitude. Why did an American like me care what happened in Austria? It was the Olympics. His entire country was counting on his 22 year-old legs, and it seemed as if they were all lining the run. It was simple enough for this fifth-grader to understand: Klammer had to race down the mountain faster than Russi’s posted 1:46:06 in order to win the gold medal. Klammer was the final skier of 15 to enter the chute. Bernhard Russi of Switzerland, the reigning Olympic gold medalist, had laid down a near-perfect run at Patscherkofel. Franz Klammer was Austria’s national hero, the host country’s best bet to win a gold medal. I was nine years old, and my parents allowed us to stay up late. It was lost on no one that he was quite ursine himself. What were we supposed to do, flip over to Grizzly Adams?ĭan Haggerty. When there were only four or five channels to choose from, and no internet and not even video games, the entire nation was a captive audience. Here were ABC’s cameras taking you to points on the globe that you’d only otherwise see in a James Bond film televising sports in prime-time, night after night, which was just bizarre. The Olympics, in the 1970s, were exotic and exhilarating. Maybe because no one ever made a movie about it. Televised sports had advanced by leaps and bounds in a decade but the age of round-the-clock coverage, of ESPN and CNN, was not yet upon us.Īll of which is a preamble for me to say this: for all of the sports I’ve witnessed, in person and on TV, and for as much as I love college athletics, if you ask me to name the two best goosebumps moments of sports I’ve seen, it’s a quick answer: the USA beating the USSR in hockey in 1980 (the “Miracle on Ice”), which everyone is familiar with and Franz Klammer’s gold-medal downhill run in Innsbruck, Austria, 1976, a moment that rarely gets mentioned. Ask Jordan Belfort.Īnyway, it was in those days, in my childhood, the Seventies, that the Olympics were at their zenith. Limits, at least when it comes to appetites, are usually a good thing. I like Beck Bennett, but “more is better” is not necessarily true. But, as for nationally televised events, they were mostly one day per week.
Sure, you could see your local pro teams on television - my Knicks were on WOR-TV, Channel 9, while Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer brought me the Yankees on WPIX-TV, Channel 11. No DirecTV, with “football on your phone.” And, of course, no ESPN.Īnd, so, in those Dark Ages before cable television, sporting events were exactly that: events. Yes, it was an era in which skiers who did not look like Lindsay Vonn could actually garner the cover of Sports Illustrated.
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