The unfair side of Harrigan’s excellence: USA softball suffers

The last time Lori Harrigan made a softball dance, a hot breeze was blowing off the Mediterranean Sea. A little Chinese girl was standing 40 feet away, with a pouty look on her face. Easy, David Bowie. This one held an aluminum bat in her hands.

It was Athens 2004. Harrigan was 33, the oldest member of the U.S. softball team, pitching in the world's oldest city. Or at least in one of its suburbs, 16 miles away. Harrigan was well on her way to her third consecutive Olympic gold medal. Team USA would outscore its collective opponents, 51-1.

The run did not come off Lori Harrigan, the statuesque, left-handed blonde from Las Vegas by way of Anaheim, Calif., because in 2004 in Athens and in 2000 in Sydney and in 1996 in Atlanta, Lori Harrigan could make a softball dance.

Today? Not so much. Her pitches, she readily admits, sort of do the limbo. Some go under the bar. Some go over. There's a reason. During the second inning Saturday, when Harrigan was warming up in the bullpen at the UNLV softball alumnae game, I discovered it. Er, him.

A little boy had wandered into foul territory in right field. When he got close to the foul line, he got down on all fours and started to crawl. Sort of like those little Chinese girls in Athens in 2004.

It was Harrigan's 3-year-old son, Shawn. Yes, she now has a son, and a husband, Andrew. She has a real life now, with a real job, as a security supervisor at the Mandarin Oriental, the 47-story luxury hotel at CityCenter. It's hard to make a softball dance when you are raising a family and supervising security. Mind you, she's not complaining.

"If I would have known it was going to be like this," Harrigan said about becoming a mother and a wife and all those other things she had to put off while she was spanning the globe playing softball, "I would have gladly traded a couple of gold medals and started earlier."

Then softball still might be an Olympic sport.

Maybe it was just coincidence that the International Olympic Committee decided to drop softball (along with baseball) at the pinnacle of Team USA's dominance, but maybe you still believe in Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the tooth fairy, too.

Harrigan thinks there was more to it than three gold medals and 51-1 in 2004, that politics had something to do with it because politics always influences Olympic things. Especially in figure skating when there are French judges.

Softball won't be played at the Summer Games in London in 2012, nor in Rio in 2016.

A lot of Harrigan's former teammates are doing what they can to help softball get reinstated, which is to say complain a lot.

What it will probably take is for Jacques Rogge, the curmudgeonly IOC president, to get a whole lot older. Rogge is from Belgium, and the Belgians apparently can be as stubborn as the neighboring French when it comes to these matters.

All kidding aside, keeping softball out of the Olympics is threatening the game's future, at least on the international stage.

With the U.S. Olympic Committee no longer funding Team USA, Harrigan fears the youngsters she instructs in private lessons and at public clinics won't have the same opportunity she did. The fallout could lead to girls losing interest in the sport, and so on and so forth, to the point that there are no longer alumnae games where the greats such as Lori Harrigan can take a bow and throw a few riseballs.

"Oh ... that ... certainly wasn't what it used to be," she said Saturday.

Harrigan pitched one inning against the current Rebels, not to see if she still can do it, but for old-time's sake. And so those who remember, who came to take her picture, would have something to show their family members and friends.

"See this?" you can almost hear them saying as they cycle through the menus on their little cameras and high-tech cell phones. "That's me and Lori Harrigan. You don't remember Lori Harrigan? The softball pitcher? Three Olympic gold medals? Duh! Yeah, you remember her.

"She could really make a softball dance."

Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352.