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When the three Olympic villages opened for the athletes two weeks before the Games, Ueberroth waited for the predicted nightmares to happen. By now the tension had reached its peak. "I always had the feeling," he recalls, "that at any second something would erupt." Foremost in his mind was the realization that at Munich in 1972 the Israeli athletes had not been seized until the tenth day. "I carried a calendar around in the center of my skull," he says. Crises, small and large, occurred by the hour. The man Ueberroth had picked to climb the towering steps of the Coliseum to light the Olympic flame, former Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson, developed shin splints. Three times Ueberroth was told Johnson could not make the climb, and each time Ueberroth declared he must. Johnson finally did. The day before the opening, a fire broke out in one of the stadium towers, shooting flames into the sky. "We thought terrorism every time," remembers Ueberroth.
An hour and a half before the opening ceremony, word suddenly came that the Olympic flame must not be lit. Two unfamiliar electrical wires were discovered leading to the gas jet. General Manager Usher remembers thinking: "Jesus Christ, this is it, it's happening." Security rushed in, and found that TV technicians had laid the new wires without informing anyone. Rumors and suspicions of sabotage were legion. Eighty investigations of bomb scares took place. The dormitory in which the Israelis and Turks lived was evacuated several times.
Ueberroth himself was constantly on the move, racing to the scene when the stands collapsed under a large crowd watching team handball (injuring six spectators), riding a helicopter over the freeways checking traffic (the gridlock that the press had predicted for a year did not materialize). To boost spirits, Ueberroth wore a different uniform each day: a bus driver's suit, a kitchen staffer's whites, a blue and gold usher's shirt. He strapped an electronic gadget on his hip that delivered printed, urgent messages to him.
Wherever Ueberroth spotted security forces, he sought them out to shake hands. There were 29 different police forces involved in the Los Angeles Games, and some believe the security there will rank for years as a model. The key, to Ueberroth, was attitude more than equipment. "The law-enforcement people were so upbeat," he explains, "and that affected everyone." Ueberroth himself had a few scares. One night four men carrying sawed-off | shotguns leaped over the security fence around his house but were caught; their objective was never clear. On another occasion two of Ueberroth's dogs died from poisoned meat thrown onto his lawn. But basically, for the man of control, everything worked. Called to the platform at the close of the Games, Ueberroth received a prolonged, roaring ovation from the crowd of 93,000--and felt his eyes fill up and his head take a most unaccustomed spin.