Bud Greenspan, Olympics filmmaker, dies at 84

Bud Greenspan, the filmmaker whose documentaries often soared as triumphantly as the Olympic athletes he chronicled for more than six decades, died at his home in New York City. He was 84.

He died Saturday from complications of Parkinson's disease, companion Nancy Beffa said.

"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. "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."

Even as controversies over politics, performance-enhancing drugs and commercialism increasingly vied for attention on the planet's grandest sporting stage, Greenspan was uncompromising about his focus on the most inspirational stories.

"I spend my time on about the 99 percent of what's good about the Olympics and most people spend 100 percent of their time on the one percent that's negative. I've been criticized for seeing things through rose-colored glasses, but the percentages are with me," he said in an interview with ESPN.com nearly a decade ago.

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 was aired in more than 80 countries.

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, even in a swirling blizzard. His most recent work, about the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games - which Greenspan attended - will be ready for release in the coming weeks.

Greenspan was an opera and history buff, and got his first break while working as an extra at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. There, he met an aspiring baritone named John Davis, who was also the U.S. Olympic weightlifting gold medalist from the London Games.

Greenspan wrote a story about Davis, then followed him to Helsinki, where Davis won a second gold and subsequently became the subject of Greenspan's first film, "The Strongest Man in the World."

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."

Born Joseph Greenspan, the native New Yorker also wrote books, produced nearly 20 spoken-word albums and was an avid tennis players into his 70s.