Oh, to catch Bud Greenspan’s eye and then turn up in one of his Olympic documentaries. For many athletes, from the famous to the obscure, the honor ranked just behind winning a medal.
The filmmaker, whose riveting tales soared as triumphantly as the men and women he chronicled for more than six decades, died Saturday at his home in New York City of complications from Parkinson’s disease, companion Nancy Beffa said. He was 84.
“Bud was a storyteller first and foremost. He never lost his sense of wonder, and he never wavered in the stories he wanted to tell, nor how he told them,” she said through a family friend. “No schmaltzy music, no fog machines, none of that. He wanted to show why athletes endured what they did and how they accomplished what so few people ever do.”
As a 21-year-old radio reporter, Greenspan filed his first Olympic story from a phone booth at Wembley stadium at the 1948 London Games. He cut a distinct figure at nearly every Summer and Winter Games afterward, his eyeglasses familiarly perched atop a bald dome. His most recent work, about the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games — which Greenspan attended — will be ready for release in the coming weeks.
Yet even as controversies over politics, performance-enhancing drugs and commercialism increasingly vied for attention on the planet’s grandest sporting stage, he remained uncompromising about his focus on the most inspirational stories.
Greenspan received lifetime achievement awards from the Directors Guild of America and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, as well as a Peabody and the Olympic Order award. His best-known work was “The Olympiad,” the culmination of 10 years of research, more than 3 million feet of rare, archival film, hundreds of interviews and visits to more than 30 nations. The 10-part series he produced was aired in more than 80 countries.
Mike Moran, a former U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman, said “Greenspan’s lifetime of work was to the Olympic Games and the athletes what John Ford’s cinema was to the American West. He had no peer in his craft, and he was the artist that thousands of Olympic athletes dreamed of when they thought of how their stories might be told one day.”
Greenspan’s career took off with a film he made in 1964 about Olympian Jesse Owens returning to the scene of his gold-medal achievements in Berlin 28 years earlier. But he never lost his love for the smallest victories as well, citing a last-place finish by Tanzanian marathoner John Stephen Ahkwari at Mexico City in 1968 as his favorite.
“He came in about an hour and a half after the winner. He was practically carrying his leg, it was so bloodied and bandaged,” Greenspan recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why did you keep going?’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. My country did not send me 5,000 miles to start a race, they sent me to finish it.’ That sent chills down my spine, and I’ve always remembered it.”