Tom Becket, Linda Lorimar, Rick Levin, Coaches, Captains, faculty members, SOI Volunteers, Members of the Bob Kiphuth Award Committee:
It’s now Wednesday, April 5th, 1995, fully three days, 19 hours and 43 minutes after Bob Lipsyte’s eruption in the New York Times Magazine section this past Sunday. His article, ‘The Emasculation of Sports,” ran seven full pages counting photographs, and his blast covered much more than the mere “emasculation " of sports. It should have been entitled, ‘The Degeneration and Debacle of Sports.”
Regardless of the title, nothing, in my judgment, has struck more eloquently or ruthlessly into the heart of the sports world, at least into the professional part. Lipsyte finds no heart at all there, just bulging wallets, super-egos, and sponging wheeler-dealers known as “agents.”
Many questions are produced by that article. I ask myself, for example,:--
Will baseball ever recover fully from the strike where the only subject of discussion or disagreement was money? Will swimming be the same after Louganis? Or football after O.J. Simpson? Or skating after Tonya Harding?
What can be worse than last year in professional sports? Worse for the shattering of another part of the American dream. Our best, most unselfish leaders in politics Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby, murdered. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the only double-defamation of American Politics, at one time and for despicable reasons, in American history now being resuscitated! Politics then...Sports now. Business yesterday with Ivan Boesky, Michael Milliken, Charles Keating, the savings and loan thug.
Is America, our United States of America, coming apart at the seams? Are we disintegrating in the central cities, and disgraceful in our antipathy to refugees seeking safety from dictators? Cut off the welfare payments, says Newt Gingrich. Everyone who’s poor deserves what they’ve got!
Just at this moment in our national history, Yale University steps forward and volunteers to host the Special Olympics Games. The State of Connecticut guarantees the bid financially. The Yale Medical School, the Law School, and the Divinity School join in an unprecedented United Nations Symposium on mental retardation world-wide, and the President of the United States comes to Yale to dignify Special Olympics by his presence at our Opening Ceremonies.
No one is getting richer financially in these activities. 45,000 persons are volunteering their time here in Connecticut alone. The Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, and his Deputy, Strobe Talbot, are hosting a banquet atop the State Department in Washington for 250 foreign dignitaries, scientists, politicians, medical doctors, and lawyers all dedicated to assisting human beings with mental retardation. The United States Mint is producing a new, silver, one-dollar commemorative coin, 800,000 of them, for sale beginning May 6th. What ‘s so special about that? Well, the answer is simple: -- It’s the first coin ever minted by the U. S. Government with a living woman on its face. That woman is the founder of Special Olympics, and her coin, so to speak, will be welcomed into the Olympic Museum in Switzerland next week – once again the first such coin ever honored. Juan Antonio Samaranch, President of the I.O.C. and the Director of the U.S. Mint both will honor this event by their presence!!
All of this is new for persons with mental retardation. All of this is the direct opposite of ‘The Emasculation of Sports,” described in the New York Times . All of this will affect New Haven and Connecticut beneficially, probably as much as any single event in recent State history. And, all of this concerns amateur sports!!!
Except in the Ivy League, are amateur sports played, in an organized way, anywhere in our country, anymore? I exclude “duffers” at golf; country club tennis players; fitness freaks, high school youngsters, and all those quasi-professionals playing sports for class colleges.
We know what “amateur” means, don’t we, we Yale students, graduates, coaches, and teachers? It comes, remember, from that Latin verb, -- Amo, Amas, Amat, etc. We learned decades ago that “amo” means I love; “amas” means you love; “amat” means he, she, or it loves. So, “amateur " means lover -- lover of music, lover of history, lover of languages, lover of sports. Just the opposite of ‘professional,’ which means my work, my job, my status as a lawyer, doctor, accountant, stockbroker, executive, or professional athlete . We pay those professionals. We even pay just to see them play, or should I say, perform. They don ‘t really play anymore. They work at their game. They work for their living by performing their jobs better than anyone.
Nothing is wrong, most of the time, in what they do. They earn their living as performers. But they are not amateurs.
Special Olympics, however, has always been, and remains today, amateur.
Almost everyone in Special Olympics volunteers. Our latest estimate reveals that almost 1,000,000 persons volunteer, annually, in the Special Olympics Movement worldwide. Less than 500 paid employees manage 965,000 Special Olympics athletes and games in 143 countries! Here at Yale this summer some 45,000 volunteers will be working to help manage and stage your World Games. Doctors, lawyers, union workers, coaches, parents, bus drivers, accountants, faculty members from all of Connecticut ‘s colleges are volunteering! Dentists will be giving dental care, free-of-charge to everyone of the 7,200 athletes! Without this army of volunteers -- more than 60,000 people altogether, these Special Olympics World Games could not be produced for $32,000,000.
Comparisons are often odious, but forgive me, please, just one comparison:
The regular Olympic Games in Atlanta next year will cost approximately $1,200,000,000. Some 12,000 athletes will compete. Those Games will cost forty times more than the Special Olympics Games. They will cost approximately $120,000 per participant; Special Olympics will cost about $4,500 per participant. Every Special Olympics athlete will go home “a winner.” Of the 10,000 regular Olympic athletes, 9,000 or more will go home defeated, without any medal or ribbon to show for their efforts. Is defeat, and the acceptance of it, what we want to teach the best of all athletes?
Amateurism in Special Olympics also means more than the absence of money paid to athletes, coaches, or other essential helpers. It also means no money changes hands with the athletes above or beneath the table. No training or coaching fees are charged to the athletes. Not even an entrance fee is charged to the thousands of spectators who attend the Games -- 65,000 in 1991 just for the Opening Ceremonies of the Eighth International Summer Games in Minneapolis/St. Paul...an estimated 750,000 here in Connecticut this coming summer.
The coaches, the referees, the medical doctors, the policemen and policewomen, the starters and timers, the lawyers and accountants, the computer operators and union members and the publicists, nearly all of them, work for practically nothing. No sports organization has so many volunteers, almost one million. They give themselves just as the athletes do, for the love of sport and for one another, as true amateurs in their hearts and actions.
‘The sun never sets on Special Olympics.” Special Olympics goes on night and day...every day...in30,000 communities throughout the world from Moscow to Bangkok, from Harare and Dar-es-Salaam to Lima and Rio de Janeiro! Even as I speak, Special Olympics training and coaching are in progress. Rome was not built in a day. Neither is a Special Olympics athlete!
Special Olympics is not nationalistic. We play no national anthems. We wave no flags. We permit no computation of medals won by specific countries. It is individual effort and achievements that count.
Special Olympics is open to competitors of all ages. We have medal winners who are eight, nine, ten and up to eighty years of age. And we have winners who are able to compete only at the lowest level of physical ability in what we describe as the Motor Activities Training Program, and every Special Olympics athlete has the chance to win, as they compete in divisions only with athletes of the same, or approximately the same, ability.
Special Olympics is totally free of performance-enhancing drugs. Instead we are interested in enhancing the ability of every participant, increasing their self-esteem and self-confidence, and improving them physically, psychologically and spiritually.
We do not believe that sports are an end in themselves. We do not permit sports to dominate us or our athletes. We use sports to help people develop, not to inhibit their development in other areas.
Special Olympics involves the parents and siblings of our athletes. Families help to coach and train their own Special Olympics athlete. They provide transportation. They sit on Boards of Directors. They raise money. Ten thousand parents and siblings attended out last International Summer Games. They were housed, fed and transported, free-of-charge, by volunteer hosts and families! They wore T-shirts proudly announcing that they were the parents of a Special Olympics athlete. They sat in specially reserved seats.
Here in Connecticut, this year, you have invented, and are executing, a totally new and brilliant idea! Your State, and practically every town within your State, will receive the athletes and coaches from a specific country for three days before the Games begin. Every town and its citizens have been studying everything about the specific country whose athletes and coaches will be coming to stay with them. They will be fully prepared to welcome the visitors before the Special Olympics actually begin. This hospitality, your hospitality, is unprecedented in athletic history and surely symbolizes what amateurism is all about.
Special Olympics lights a candle of hope for all of the 200 million people with mental retardation in the world. Fortunately, and increasing number of people of normal intelligence are coming to know what Special Olympics athletes can do. They are beginning to realize that they, themselves, can work with persons with mental retardation. They are learning that some day they someday will achieve similar successes in their own towns and cities, and in Special Olympics World Games of the future. They know that Special Olympics recognizes the God-given beauty inside every human being.
No wonder that in 1988, Special Olympics was the first sports organization for handicapped persons fully recognized by the I.O.C. and the only one authorized to use the word Olympics in our title!
Today I have never been more proud to be an Alumnus of Yale. Nor more happy to thank the University and the Sports Department leaders and coaches for bestowing the Bob Kiphuth Award on the one person I know best and admire the most in all the world. True, I am only one of her army of admirers, but she does bear my family name and every day she adds to my joy in living.
Think of these almost unbelievable facts: --
Twenty-seven years ago, there was no sports program anywhere in the world for persons with mental retardation. What ‘s more, there had never been any such sports program anywhere at any time in human history! Now, almost 1,000,000 athletes compete in Special Olympics sports. That number grows annually. Many predict that 2,000,000 will be enrolled by the year 2,000, and others claim that in the year 2,020 there will be 4,000,000. No sports program has ever equaled that rate of growth.
Second, Yale University is the first institution of the highest academic status, world-wide, to put its international prestige and academic authority behind a sports movement for persons with mental retardation.
Third, when I graduated from Yale College, no one on the faculty and no students, including me, cared for 10 seconds about persons with mental retardation. We hardly knew they existed. Now, Yale gives courses on mental disabilities. The Medical School, the Law School, and the Divinity School are holding academic seminars. They plan a symposium on mental retardation at the United Nations this coming June. – the first such Symposium in U.N. history!
Fourth, most of you know, I hope, that this July at Yale, the first, full-length, Olympic Marathon, run by persons with mental retardation, will come to its finish line in the Yale Bowl. 50,000 spectators will be applauding the Special Olympics athletes running that classical race. And they will be finishing the Marathon in three hours and 20 minutes. That ‘s faster that the best runner in the world in the Olympic Games of 1904, 1908, and 1912.
How many of us, our friends, can run the 100 meter race faster than 11:00 seconds flat? That speed would be necessary to beat our sprinters this July. How many of us now, or in our prime, could run the mile faster than four minutes and five seconds? Special Olympics athletes can! Maybe this summer they will surpass even that record.
Let me conclude this speech with just one thought: --
Bob Kiphuth coached Yale swimmers to 500 or more dual meet victories, 14 NCAA Championships, and he was Head Coach of the Men ‘s Olympics Team in 1936, 1940, and 1948. His 1948 Team was the first swimming team in Olympic history to win first place in every event! He was probably the greatest swimming coach in history. But Bob Kiphuth himself could not swim a stroke!!
How could that happen?
It happened because he was the best Motivator of his era, maybe the best motivator in sports in this entire century. That means he had something in him which brought our the best in others. That’s the greatest achievement for any coach...or for any person.
Today, I thank you for selecting a person in the Kiphuth and Yale tradition, a person who, through sports, has brought out the best in millions of human beings who never before had a friend, let alone a coach.
That person is Eunice Shriver, who has always worked for God and country and now is working also for Yale!
