Olympic fever

Bruce Jenner, 62

 I love the summer Olympics.  I am writing this while sitting in bed watching the London 2012 games.  I am old enough to remember sitting on a bean bag in my parents' living room in Priest River, Idaho, watching the 1976 games in Montreal, when Bruce Jenner was a gold medalist decathlete.  His photo peered at me with all its Olympic glory every morning from a box of Wheaties as the 11-year-old me ate my “Breakfast of Champions.”  (In a cautionary tale regarding hero worship, the Bruce Jenner of 2012 is contending for the gold medal in plastic-surgery-gone-wrong when he isn’t a guest star on a reality television show featuring his stepchildren, the Kardashians.)  The United States boycotted the 1980 summer games in Moscow because the commies had invaded Afghanistan, back when we considered invading Afghanistan to be a bad thing.  As an eighteen-year-old, I developed a serious crush on America’s sweetheart, Mary Lou Retton, the all-around gold-medal gymnast at the 1984 games in Los Angeles.  We didn’t know it at the time, but Seoul in 1988 was the last Olympics we could root against our Cold War enemies, the evil Soviets and their jack-booted sidekicks, the East Germans.  Since then, we’ve seen fewer athletes with protruding foreheads, hyper-developed muscularity, and prodigious facial hair.  God I miss those Eastern Block female swimmers.  In 1992 in Barcelona, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and the rest of the Dream Team cruised to the gold medal in men’s basketball.  In 1996 in Atlanta, Michael Johnson and his golden shoes took gold in the 200- and 400-meter sprints.  

But it was in 2000 that I really got my Olympics on.  I watched every day for multiple hours, lying on my bed in Laramie, Wyoming, with my wife Carissa, limited only by what NBC deemed fit for us to see on tape delay from Australia.  I learned that NBC had (and still has) a diving fetish.  The network also had (and still has) a gushy athlete profile fetish so extreme that I would swell with an irrepressible urge to punch Bob Costas in the throat until he promised never to do another sappy interview with a blind beach volleyball player whose coach’s cousin’s next-door neighbor perished in a fire, along with a litter of puppies, just three days before the Olympics. But I watched.  Why?  Because I was living with a woman in the first trimester of her first pregnancy.  If a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy tells you that all she wants when she comes home from work is to crawl into bed and watch the Olympics, you crawl into bed and watch the Olympics.  If she tells you to rob a grocery store at gun point and grab up all the sauerkraut, you rob a grocery story at gun point and bring her the sauerkraut.  Because she’s pregnant and deserves even her most capricious demands to be satisified.  And because you fear her.

Lying in bed in Laramie, watching the Olympics was also a time for soon to be first-time parents to talk about their hopes and fears, their dreams and desires.  We wondered in which Olympic event(s) our little fetus would one day compete? How many Nobel prizes would it be awarded? What about college - Harvard or Yale? Maybe Stanford on a full-ride track scholarship?  And for grad school, MIT or the London School of Economics?

But before grad school, we needed to come up with a name.  Not just any name.  A name that was somehow significant and unique but at the same time not weird.  A name that both of us would immediately hear and exclaim “perfect!”  Couldn’t be the name of a former girlfriend or boyfriend or a kid at school who ate his or her boogers or a mean neighbor lady or a name that for completely arbitrary reasons one of us didn't like.  If there was an Olympic event for shooting down your partner’s baby name suggestions, we were both medal contenders.

Me: How about Mary Lou?

Carissa. Like that gymnast with the thick neck? No freaking way.

Me: OK, what about Faith? After the town where I was born?

Carissa: Nice try, but still no. . . . What about Antonio - if it’s a boy?

Me (alarmed): What? You mean like the guy at the gym who's always talking to you?

And so it went.  Back and forth rejecting baby names while sitting on our bed in Wyoming watching the Olympic games happening an entire hemisphere away in Sydney, Australia.   Nice opera house.  Nice beaches.  Shrimp on the barbie and all that.  Then suddenly, without thinking, I said: "What about Sydney if it’s a girl"?  Instead of a resounding “no,” Carissa said: " I was thinking the same thing"!  Consensus at last.  Or perhaps I simply won a war of attrition, the gold medal in the baby naming sweepstakes.  But we liked it and the name stuck.  Sydney Faith Miller was born the next spring in a Laramie blizzard.

At the time, we thought we were unique.  In 1990, “Sydney” did not appear in the top 100 most popular baby names.  By 2001 when we joined the bandwagon, it was 32^nd.  But if our timing had been a bit different, Beijing Faith Miller would have been an awesome name.  No doubt she would have discussed this with Bob Costas after medaling in the platform diving competition at the 2024 games in Cairo.  Meanwhile, just off camera, NBC security is Tasing a crazed man threatening to punch Costas in the throat.