Columnist Ron Kantowski: Let the Games be bullet free

Thursday, Sept. 14, 2000 | 11:10 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. His inside notes appears Tuesday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

"They're all gone."

With those grim words, uttered on a September night in 1972, a teary-eyed Jim McKay confirmed that sports and politics can be a volatile mix.

It's hard to believe it has been 28 years since Palestinian commandos lobbed a hand grenade onto a helicopter, killing the last of the 11 Israeli athletes they had taken hostage 24 hours earlier during the Munich Summer Games.

Nobody who watched the tragedy unfold on live television will ever forget it. Before that fateful "One Day in September," which is what HBO is calling its riveting documentary on the Olympic hostage massacre that began its run this week, about the only exposure my peer group had to terrorism is when the tough guys from the wrong side of the tracks cruised downed Main in their conversion vans, looking to steal our girlfriends.

This was different. This wasn't angry stares and bloody noses. This was people killing other people for reasons that a bunch of guys just three years removed from Little League couldn't fully comprehend.

It was life-and-death drama being played out in our living rooms. Only Efram Zimbalist Jr. didn't figure in the plot.

After the siege came to its disastrous end in a hail of gunfire and shrapnel at a Munich airport, I vividly recall walking home from my girlfriend's house, feeling sad and vulnerable.

Those emotions were rekindled watching HBO's Oscar-winning documentary. But mostly, I was stunned -- not that a vile act of terrorism could occur in such an idealistic setting, but that the idealists -- the Olympic and law enforcement authorities and agencies assigned to the Games -- were so poorly equipped to deal with such a circumstance.

It was like watching Barney Fife confront a bank robber from Mount Pilot.

For starters, because these were supposed to be the feel-good Olympics that were to make the world forget Adolf Hitler's 1936 Games in Berlin, security was lax. The security force didn't even carry sidearms.

Patrolling the Olympic Village apparently was a 9-to-5 job, because on the night the terrorists infiltrated the compound that housed the athletes, the only souls they encountered were American athletes. The Yanks, mistaking the guerillas for fellow competitors who also had sneaked out after curfew, actually helped them scale the fence.

Other startling developments, as chronicled in the HBO special:

As the siege was continuing no more than 200 yards away, dozens of athletes were shown sunning themselves in the village commons, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around them; when snipers finally were deployed, the terrorists watched their every move on TVs that were part of the furnishings in every room in the village; and when it was finally decided to fight firearms with firearms, a grand total of five snipers were sent to the airport, to neutralize eight terrorists.

Unless two of the good guys were named Batman and Robin, the authorities totally underestimated the gravity of the situation.

Hopefully, the IOC has learned its lesson. On Tuesday, thousands of fans were detained by security personnel as they attempted to enter the soccer stadium in Sydney and missed the first part of the match between the host Aussies and Germany, and that's a good sign.

Lest we forget Munich, it's always better to see blood boil than spilled.