Wearing a rugby shirt and scuffed-up sneakers, he squats in the Catholic University bleachers like an excited kid, listening to the advice of the surrounding middle-school-aged boys and vigorously punching notes into his BlackBerry. “Always tell the truth,” he repeats as he types, “… listen to your parents … be a man … always do your best.” In a few weeks, he will deliver a commencement speech at an area high school, and he is asking the boys for guidance on what to say.

He is Timothy Shriver, M.A. 1988, the chairman of a multimillion-dollar charity, a successful film producer and a member of the legendary Kennedy family. But, he says, some of the biggest thrills in his life come from the lessons he learns from young athletes with mental retardation.

“These athletes teach me what it means to do your best in any given situation — nothing more, nothing less,” says Shriver, the chairman (and until recently the CEO) of Special Olympics, a Washington, D.C.-based organization providing sports training and athletic competition for people with intellectual disabilities around the world. (In response to a call from the athletes, the term “intellectual disabilities” has displaced “mental retardation.”)

Special Olympics comprises 200 programs representing 150 countries and every U.S. state, boasts more than 500,000 volunteers and oversees a World Summer Games and a World Winter Games — each held every four years. Special Olympics brought in $209.7 million in income in 2003.

Shriver has applied the lesson of doing one’s best directly to his organization. CEO of Special Olympics from 1996 to June of this year, Shriver set a goal in 2000 to double the annual number of Special Olympics athletes from 1 million to 2 million by the end of 2005. Taped conspicuously above his office desk is a single sheet of lined paper with a large number written in green highlighter: “1,740,895.”

“That was where we were at the end of 2004,” says Shriver. “I change it every year.”

If the green number reads “2,000,000” by next January, Shriver will have had a lot to do with it. During his tenure the organization celebrated its first World Summer Games in an overseas location (in Dublin, Ireland, in 2003), launched the first Asian World Games (in Nagano, Japan, earlier this year) and scheduled the first-ever U.S. National Games (taking place next July at Iowa State University).

While CEO, Shriver injected the followinginitiatives into the organization to tackle such issues as health, education and family support:

• The Athlete Leadership Program, which places athletes in noncompetitive leadership roles such as Special Olympics spokesperson, writer, photographer or even
  board member;
• “Healthy Athletes,” which provides health screenings and other forms of health care to athletes at world, national and regional games;
• “Family Support Network,” which reaches out to athletes’ family members who might suffer from social stigma; and
• “Special Olympics Get Into It,” which fosters interaction between athletes and nondisabled children.

“We are working to change the world’s reaction to people with intellectual disabilities from sympathy and pity to recognition of skills and empowerment,” Shriver explains. “This is a movement both on and off the playing field that sees those with intellectual disabilities as people of giftedness, not weakness.”

From Camp Shriver to Special Olympics
Special Olympics began with Eunice Kennedy Shriver, one of nine children in a family that included siblings John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the country’s 35th president, and Rosemary Kennedy, whose mental retardation was treated with a failed lobotomy.

Ms. Shriver, believing in the capabilities of those with mental retardation and incensed at seeing them routinely abused and neglected, put her convictions into action in 1962. She invited 35 disabled boys and girls to her Rockville, Md., home to participate in a summer camp centered around one of her favorite things: sports. Her third child, Timothy, was only 3 years old at the time.

By 1968, “Camp Shriver” had become an annual event and had spurred the formation of 300 similar camps across the country. In July of that year, Ms. Shriver officially opened the first International Special Olympics Games, held at Chicago’s Soldier Field, with 1,000 athletes from 26 U.S. states and Canada competing.

“The most important thing about my mother is that she always stuck to her passion,” says Timothy Shriver, who eventually took over her role as leader of Special Olympics. “Part of her passion in building Special Olympics was her fury from witnessing the enormous pain of people who are treated badly for no reason.” Shriver’s voice grows more emotional as he continues. “Nothing they’ve done, no violation of the law, no offense to anybody else — just for being born.”

With the thick hair and dashing looks characteristic of his uncles John and Robert F. Kennedy, Shriver also has an excitable way about him. His shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, he continuously swivels in his office chair like a man who yearns to compete in the games himself.

“People say these athletes don’t care if they win or lose, but that’s bull. They want to win,” Shriver animatedly declares. “When you see an athlete throw up his arms in victory at the end of a 100-meter dash — whether he ran it in 20 seconds or 50 seconds — it’s because he won, and that’s real — it’s not a fake, it’s not a joke. This organization pushes so hard because we want to be as tough and as committed to making a difference as the athletes.”

When not promoting athletics, Shriver is promoting film. He co-produced the 1997 movie “Amistad” and a 2000 release about a learning-disabled athlete, “The Loretta Claiborne Story.” Although he says making movies is just a hobby, Shriver’s films are closely tied to his mission of bettering the lives of the disadvantaged. “If you want to change the way people think, you have to come at it multi modally,” he says. Shriver is currently working on a film based on the book Expecting Adam, which follows one woman’s experience of giving birth to a child with Down syndrome.

Love and Other Deep Things
There were two factors that drove Shriver’s decision to attend CUA to pursue a master’s degree in religious studies during the mid 1980s. The first involved a profound desire to answer the deep questions posed by his students while he was a high school history teacher in New Haven, Conn.

“There were many questions I felt ill-equipped to answer, and I felt I needed to better understand the students’ inner lives,” Shriver explains. The questions — which ranged from “Why is there so much racism and hate?” to “How do you make the world better?” — seemed to Shriver to encapsulate many spiritual elements, and the former history teacher says he believed that “Catholic’s program in spirituality studies was one of the best.”

The second factor: “The girl I wanted to marry was working at a law firm in Washington, and she refused to work anywhere but there,” he confesses with a laugh. The CUA student did get the girl, Linda Potter. Married in 1986, they have five children, ages 7 to 17. – J.H.T.

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