Friday Features: UNA's Jeff Hodges Reflects on His Olympic Experiences
By Chris Megginson
Every two years, when the world’s best athletes gather to compete in the grandest international competition in sports, memories surface for the University of North Alabama’s Jeff Hodges of his three Olympic experiences, including the 1994 and 2002 Winter Olympics.
“I just love the Olympics, period,” Hodges said. “I’m a big USA fan, so whatever we’re competing in, I’m excited for it.”
Hodges, UNA’s assistant athletics director for communications, is known for his 34 years as the Lions’ first full-time sports information director, including nearly three decades of work with NCAA Division II Football Championship Game, Harlon Hill Trophy and creation of the NCAA Division II Football Hall of Fame. But in 1987, only his fourth-year in the business, he answered an ad in the CoSIDA Digest that changed his resume for the next 15 years – a chance to volunteer at the U.S. Olympic Festival in North Carolina. In 1993, he did it again, this time in San Antonio. The event was a chance to showcase the U.S.’s top athletes in an Olympic-style national championship of sorts, the years following the games.
After returning from San Antonio, Hodges received a phone call from Bob Condon, the United States Olympic Committee chief of media services asking if Hodges would like to spend the month of February in Norway for the 1994 XVII Olympic Winter Games. He first said he’d need to run the idea past his wife, Karen, and athletic director, but when Condon explained Hodges would one of 12 members on the USOC communications staff and would walk in the Opening Ceremonies, Hodges jumped at the chance.
“It’s one of those phone calls like you’ve won a million dollars,” Hodges recalls. “I said, ‘put me down. I’ll tell my wife I’m going. I’ll tell my AD I’m going. I don’t have to ask. I’m in, whatever I have to do.’”
In the weeks leading up to his departure, Hodges says he was constantly receiving gifts in the mail from the USOC.
Come February, when Hodges joined the rest of the USOC in Norway he was led into a ballroom at the hotel and outfitted with a different U.S. Olympic Team wardrobe for every possible scenario – Opening Games, medal ceremonies, USA sweaters to wear during the week, parkas, even a suit with the Olympic rings on the buttons and across the pocket, designed for wear when athletes visit the White House.
The games, which began Feb. 12, 1994, were opened with scandal between U.S. figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan over an attack which occurred a month prior in Detroit, two days before the Olympic trials. The attack drew increased media attention on both skaters, which Hodges was in the middle of as a worker at their opening press conferences in Norway. An Associated Press photographer captured Hodges’ involvement in the story as he helped form a human barricade between photographers and Kerrigan after her first press conference.
“People would call me from all over the country to tell me they saw it or send me clips of it. It was in the Denver Post,” Hodges recalled. “It was my Forest Gump moment”
With new documentaries and videos coming out in recent years, Hodges says he watches to see if he’ll appear again.
“It keeps it fresh in my memory how crazy all of that was,” he said.
While the Kerrigan story is the most well-known memory of the 1994 Games, Hodges said his favorite moment was the opening ceremonies.
“They were on the side of the mountain in Norway above this great valley that had a frozen lake in it with the Olympic rings in lights at the bottom. As they were having the opening ceremonies it started snowing and the guy comes down the ski jump holding the torch to light the flame. I was talking to my wife on the cell phone. She’d gone over to Decatur to see my parents and was watching it, and I’m there,” Hodges said. “That whole experience was something you couldn’t ever dream of.”
While in Norway, Hodges served as press officer for U.S. biathlon and cross-country skiing, having to put himself through a crash course to learn all there was to know about each event and the nine biathletes and 15 cross-country skiers the U.S. had competing. Using a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, which could view eight lines at a time, Hodges and the other USOC press officers wrote releases on their teams and ushered athletes to interviews with CBS or TNT.
“The Winter Olympics was so much different than anything I was used to, but then you realize you’re doing the same thing you do on a daily basis, you’re putting out press releases, you’re coordinating the press row, but it’s on a much bigger scale, so if you screw something up a lot of people are going to know about it.”
Hodges didn’t screw it up. In fact, he had two stories published in the 1994 United States Olympics Book, published the year after each games by the USOC – the same book he ordered as a 9-year-old elementary student through his school’s book club after the 1968 Olympics.
“I’d go through it and I’d follow the Olympics and look at all of the U.S. records. I was fascinated with it,” said the boy who grew up less than 20 miles from Jesse Owens’ hometown. “(Being published in 1994) was unbelievable, like maybe that’s what I was destined to do.”
In 1996, he was recommended by Condon to serve as the venue press chief for volleyball at the Omni in Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics. In 2002, he was once again invited back, this time as the venue press chief at the 2001 U.S. Nordic Ski Festival in Park City, Utah and venue chief for Ski Jump at Utah Olympic Park in Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics.
He says some of the major differences between the day-to-day life of an SID and coordinating media for an event as large as the Olympics is the quantity and diversity of the media.
The 1996 Olympics volleyball matches in Atlanta, which ran from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m. each day during pool play, leaving Hodges with an average of three hours of sleep each night, drew a crowd of more than 3,000 media credentials.
“You think about CBS or now NBC covering it for the United States, but you have a different network for every country, so the number of media is unbelievable,” he said.
Hodges said one of the largest learning curves was learning to work with interpreters, which would mean sometimes hearing laughter after an athlete’s comment and having to wait to hear the interpretation before the rest of the room understood and laughed.
Each games has its share of moments that mark the event in history. For the 1996 Games, obviously the Centennial Olympic Park bombing is one that stands out, which happened less than an hour after Hodges and his staff left the Omni around 1 a.m. July 27, 1996.
“That changed everything for the last week and a half we were there,” he said.
The Omni became the military command post for Downtown Atlanta, hosting the U.S. Secret Service, FBI and more, especially when Vice President Al Gore visited, a day that also stands out in Hodges’ memory, not for the visit, but when an international cameraman jokingly said in broken English, “Yes, it’s a bomb” when told he couldn’t leave his camera bag unattended.
“Five seconds later he was airborne,” Hodges said. “They picked him up and ran with him out of the building and slammed him on a table and ripped his clothes off then got his camera bag and ran out with it. They came and asked me to get an interpreter to explain to him why he was out of the Olympics and they’d taken his credentials … It was a real eye-opener, but that’s how serious things were at that point.”
The other Omni memory that stands out for Hodges is a late night fight that broke out between Brazil and Cuba’s women’s volleyball teams that lasted more than an hour as it continued through the building after the match.
Each Olympics was different. Norway was an experience like none other. Atlanta was busy with nearly 20 hour days and only the occasional opportunity to see another event, such as slipping over to the Georgia Dome just in time to see Kerri Strug stick the landing on her vault to give USA Gymnastics the gold in ’96. Salt Lake was a little more laid back, presenting opportunities to see events, award ceremonies, sightsee and visit events at the University of Utah and BYU.
Through the years since his first Olympic experience in 1994, Hodges has begun to be honored for his work at the local level in Florence, Alabama and the national scene. He was inducted into both the CoSIDA and UNA Hall of Fames and last year was presented with CoSIDA’s Arch Ward Award, becoming only the second small college SID to receive the honor.
“It all goes back to I had so many opportunities early in my career,” Hodges said. “Getting in as early as I did, opportunities just kind of came my way, and I’m certainly grateful to everyone who made those things happen.”
Follow Megginson on Twitter @jcmeggs. Email comments to megginsonjc@gmail.com.
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2017-18 Friday Features Archive
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