KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Like many University of Kansas basketball fans as the NCAA Tournament was supposed to begin, Cliff Wiley felt disillusioned and deprived: His team, atop the game by virtually every metric, couldn't compete for a national title because the COVID-10 coronavirus pandemic had shut down sports.
So on March 19, the day the tournament was to start in earnest, he was absorbed in a KU-produced version of "One Shining Moment" as he tried to reconcile it all.
"This can't happen," he said in the Missouri Valley Track & Field office in the 18th & Vine District the next day. "But it does happen."
As Wiley knows only too well.
He is one of the few, the proud ... the ethereal: a 1980 U.S. Olympian whose competitive berth was forsaken by the political ploy of then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
As the pawns in a gambit both feckless and reckless, you don't know them the way you know many before and after those Games.
"But we're out there," Wiley said, smiling.
Forty years ago on April 12, when the USOC announced its acquiescence to Carter, this became a life-long burden to bear or resolve for many of the 466 American athletes who qualified ... including more than 200 who didn't make the 1984 team.
Amid the fallout of the pandemic, despite leading a meaningful life as an attorney, coach and mentor since, the parallels "hit me right away," Wiley said. And it still hurts deeply.
Along the way, though, he's come to some terms with it.
"What's that old saying?" he said. "This too shall pass, you know?"
But not without trying to make sense of it, either.
And that's something perhaps easier done in the current case, as lives are being spared by actions that included postponing the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to next year, than it is when it comes to processing 1980.
