We had a dream……and in that dream we saw NBC Titan Jeff Zucker make the power play of a lifetime when he contrived to buy out Zeus, the King of the Gods himself, and purchase the right to sit upon that mighty throne perched high atop Mount Olympus.
Mr. Zucker’s strategic calculations reinforced his empirical belief that buying an Olympic kingdom wasn’t going to be cheap. Fortunately for Zucker, however, the Roman emperors of yesteryear had generously provided an historic sampling of time-tested tactics on how to successfully secure popular opinion with just a few celebratory games.
So when this Titan doled out $2 billion for the exclusive rights to televise the international athletic games played in honor of Zeus, it was simply a means to an end. And a little pre-games warm up didn’t hurt in priming the power pump either.
We followed along in dreamy disbelief as J.Z. preemptively engineered the thundering clash between late night television Titans, Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno. In the end, Mr. Z firmly established his incontestable reign as the Peacock King when he churlishly swept Conan away with a $45 million granite curling stone and tossed him deep into Tartarus until September.
While Zeus and Zucker were battling through the hard core negotiations about who’d be king of the mountain, we watched as the other gods quickly took advantage of the distraction and did some mischief-making of their own with the athletic pawns on the ground.
No one enjoys revelry and merry-making more than the god of parties, Dionysus. Dionysus understandably felt a special kinship with Bode Miller, and made sure that the bad boy of skiing got to party and socialize at an Olympic level. Any media backlash from his boy Bode’s off course antics would be synchronistically timed to end with the Big Bang.
The divine support offered up to Lindsey Vonn by the goddess of victory, Nike, seemed undeniable. That “Sports Illustrated” cover jinx may have made her a target like Chiron for the poisonous arrow of Hercules, but if Nike wanted to prolong Lindsey's pre-race healing time by messing with the weather a little, then so be it.
As we followed the Olympic flame on its time honored pilgrimage to the winter games in Vancouver, we wondered whether or not the Peacock King would capriciously torch the Olympic broadcasts altogether and replace them with reruns of “The Tonight Show” just because he could.
And then we woke up and thought that maybe the gods knew what they were doing when they created an honorary position for Stephen Colbert on the Olympic sports psychology team. Someone has to keep us laughing, and it won’t be Conan.
But what we really want to know is who will be king of the mountain and take home the gold?
Win popular opinion the Roman way in our ‘Dream Sequence’ September 27, 2009 posting "Rise of the Global Republic”.
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