Becky Malatare received a gracious message from Manhattan Christian’s coach, Jeff Bellach, thanking her for the opportunity to compete against Phil. On Wednesday, Will went to the hospital, where he discovered he had been playing with walking pneumonia and an enormous kidney stone. He elected to delay its removal until after three all-star tournaments. College recruiters had reached out to him following the championship, and he needed one more push to get into school.
That night, Big Will went on a difficult call. He arrested one of the players from the previous year’s championship, a freshman at the University of Montana. The police said the boy had been present at a shooting, and he would later be charged for accountability to attempted deliberate homicide. Big Will apologized to the boy’s parents before driving him to Missoula.
One afternoon that week, Phil got his spotting scope and drove his red Chevy toward one of his horn-hunting spots, a ridge from which gullies descended to a river. He pulled over and fastened his scope to the open passenger window. The snow was still deep up top. He scoped until he found a herd of about 100 elk. “Can’t hide forever!” he said. “I’ll walk all this even if it don’t melt. If I know they’re dropping, I’ll go in there.” But the herd was mostly dark: cows. He was looking for the big, tawny bulls.
As he scanned the hills, Phil thought about this summer. He figured it would be his last as a kid. He planned to be starting for the Grizz by the time he was a sophomore. He wondered about the temptations of college. “After a big win, am I going to want to go be dumb?” he asked, as if it were a question he couldn’t possibly answer.
He thought about his father and T.J., who could walk these hills for a full day without eating. Phil couldn’t do that. He discoursed on the supremacy of brown antlers—which are fresh with blood—to white ones. “White’s old, brown’s new,” he said. “Put it this way: You rather have a Lamborghini or a Subaru?”
A Subaru, I said.
“But if you lived in California?”
Phil didn’t want to live in California. “Every one’s like ‘Oh, you need to get out of here,’” he said. “Which I believe. But if you love where you live, why not live there? No use movin’.”
Once I asked him about the pressure of making it with the Grizz. He said that he was “all in,” but that if it didn’t work out, that would be okay. “It’s my life,” he said. What did that mean, anyway, to make it? Was it a jersey entombed in glass? Phil couldn’t take that with him when he died. He was going to play ball as long as he could, but when it ended, he wanted to be a game warden, like T.J.’s father, Tom Haynes, so he could work in the mountains.
As chance would have it, Tom drove by just then. Maybe he was out busting someone for illegal firewood cutting. Phil went back to scoping; he had found three bulls bedded down in the snow. He was hoping one would drop its antlers right there. “That’s my dream,” he said—to see one shed through the lens of his scope. It had never happened. “Come on, guy,” he said to the elk. “Lose your horns.” His right eye affixed to the scope, the boy in constant motion was absolutely still. Only his left eyelid fluttered. “I wish I could sit here all day,” he said. He stared into the wilderness, wondering what would happen.
* * *
On Sunday, March 11, Arlee hosted a syulm, a dance celebrating warriors returning from a victorious battle, for the team. About 350 people showed up to the community center’s basketball court. The gym smelled of turkey, fry bread, spaghetti and meatballs. Irma and Bear Malatare arrived early. Irma was thinking of buying a 15-passenger van so she could take the whole family to Phil’s college games. She went inside while Bear stood out front in an Arlee Warriors state-championship jacket, long arms dangling at his sides.
Bear had been reading a history of the Cree. He normally didn’t dwell on the past. He never told Phil about his time at the boarding school, when teachers beat him for speaking his language. “We can’t constantly sit and cry about what they done to us,” he once said. But the book made him think about his grandparents’ migration from Canada, and his own father, for whom Phil was named, and his time with the nuns; the constant efforts at assimilation and extermination.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his face turning momentarily dark, his immense hands clenching. Then his hands released, and a great smile worked its way across his face. “We’re still here,” he said.
He walked inside, where mothers danced around the laughing boys, shoving them playfully down to the court. The world is never so hopeful as when the old honor the young.
Tim Layden
Fists of Fury
from Sports Illustrated
* * *
Start with the image, a still life of protest. It captures a vital moment in history, yet its meaning evolves, as time measures what has—and has not—been learned. It tells the story of a battle fought, in a war neither won nor lost, but ongoing. Of a place and a time, not so different from here and now. Of sports and division, it was fifty years ago this month. “Fifty years! Can you believe that?” says Tommie Smith, a man of 24 in the image, a much older man of 74 today. Fifty years.
In the scene, Smith stands on the top of the Olympic podium, the number 1 painted beneath his feet, which are purposefully sheathed only in black socks, with a single black Puma sneaker also perched on the platform. He is a black man wearing a black scarf beneath his red, white, and blue USA sweats, and a black glove on his right hand, which is thrust skyward, his arm so straight, it looks as if he is trying to reach into the gray overcast and bring rain. This was on the evening of October 16, 1968, in Mexico City. A Wednesday.
Many Americans saw this scene on square black-and-white televisions while eating dinner. Smith had won the gold medal in the 200 meters. It hangs from his neck as “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays. His head is bowed, his face intense. Behind him, facing the medalists’ flags, is bronze medalist John Carlos of the United States, then 23. The two men were training partners of a kind in California, but not close friends. Carlos is also shoeless in black socks, a sneaker on the platform. Beads hang from his neck, behind his medal. He has a black glove on his left hand, which is raised. His arm is slightly bent, his pose more casual than Smith’s, but no less forceful and eloquent.
There is a third man in the image, silver medalist Peter Norman, a 26-year-old Australian. He is wearing the green uniform of his country and, like Smith and Carlos, a white button pinned to his chest. Norman is looking up at the flags, smiling. Fifty years.
That is the singular moment, one of the most iconic—and important and controversial—in sports history. This is a story about that moment, but just as much about the moments that followed, laid end-to-end, repeated, until they span months and years and decades, and encompass lives and legacies. Smith and Carlos were young black men protesting racial inequality, using the platform of the ceremonial playing of their national anthem at a sports event. Where they raised their fists, a half century later Colin Kaepernick would take a knee. “We’re trying to recapture terrain that we thought was once conquered,” says Harry Edwards, the septuagenarian sports sociologist who as a 25-year-old instructor in 1968 organized the movement that led to Smith’s and Carlos’s protest.
The moment defines Smith and Carlos, as Kaepernick’s defines him, and always will. It extracted a cost—opportunity lost, money never earned, families tested and broken. They were heroes to some, pariahs to others, lauded and threatened and belittled. Smith, as sweet a mover as ever set foot on a track (Lord, to have seen him race Usain Bolt), never ran another race after the Olympic final, not uncommon in his era but poignant against the backdrop of his last performance. Carlos ran for only one more year.
Both men only found footing in society many years after Mexico City and, ever so gradually, gained acceptance as leaders. In 2005, a 22-foot statue depicting the scene on the medal stand was dedicated at San Jose State, where both had been students and competed. Three years later ESPN awarded Smith and Carlos the Arthur Ashe Courage Awar
d, and in September 2016 they were recognized at the White House by President Obama with members of the ’16 U.S. Olympic team. Yet now they grapple with the state of race relations in their country, which some days makes them wonder what they accomplished 50 years ago. “Many struggles are not final victories,” Edwards says.
And each wonders alone. Both men have family and friends and the hard-earned respect of millions, but they do not have each other. Smith is a sharecropper’s son, raised picking cotton in California’s San Joaquin Valley, serious and dutiful. Carlos was born and raised in Harlem, with the soul of a hustler. They have never been close. “Oil and water,” says Smith’s wife, Delois. The protest and all that followed did not bring them closer.
Smith and Carlos see each other on occasion—at various reunions of the 1968 Olympic team, or for paid speaking gigs. They are a set of two, keen to experiences that no other human—except perhaps Kaepernick, who has met with both men—can understand. Yet they are not a pair. They are one, and one.
* * *
It is no simple matter to gain access to Smith or Carlos to talk to them about their story. They know how its meaning has evolved, and how it is acutely relevant. But their reticence is understandable. Both are weary. Carlos is as game as ever to take on the system (you’ll see); Smith, as ever, is more cautious (you’ll see).
I started asking in late February, with emails and calls that went unanswered. I asked mutual friends to help. Nothing. Smith and Carlos speak in public regularly and sometimes together, but rarely these days sit for media interviews.
In late May, I received a reply from Delois, who handles most of Tommie’s affairs. (She is his third wife; they have been together for 21 years.) The email: “Call me tomorrow,” and a phone number. When I called, Delois talked about the many times her husband had signed the cover of the May 22, 1967, issue of Sports Illustrated, which featured the 22-year-old Smith uncoiling from starting blocks in gold sweats, next to the headline: “Blazing Quarter-Miler.” (He did not enter the 400 in Mexico City.) She also asked, “Is this a paid interview?” I told her that it was not. “I am going to grant you this interview with Dr. Smith,” Delois then said, cheerfully.
Tommie Smith has lived in a modest, two-story brick house in Stone Mountain, Georgia, since 2005, when he retired after 27 years as a teacher and coach at Santa Monica (California) College. We talked in his basement, which is a staggering monument to not just the evening of October 16, 1968, but also to his remarkable (and remarkably short) track career, to his life, to a vital era in track and field, to the Olympics, and to activism. The room is alive with memories. An Olympic flag, swiped by Smith from the Mexico City Olympic Stadium before the protest, decorated with the signatures of U.S. teammates Jim Hines, Al Oerter, Jim Ryun, and others. A framed Newsweek cover from ’68 with the headline, “The Angry Black Athlete.” A picture of his childhood home in rural Lemoore, California. Another of his junior high basketball team, with Smith towering over his teammates as a 6′2″ eighth-grader. Dozens of black-and-white action photos of Smith setting some of his 11 world records between ’66 and ’68. And several shots of the medal stand protest, some signed by Carlos and Norman.
Smith settles into a lounge chair and leans forward, engaged. “I don’t talk to everybody,” he says, “because I don’t want to fight what’s going on now in the country. I only want to talk about my belief in what I was doing.” When, in the course of a two-hour interview, the subject turns to today’s racial climate, Smith speaks slowly and carefully. He knows who he is and understands the power of his name. “I have to make all my words count,” he says. “Have things changed in fifty years? Not as much as I hoped they would. At times it’s as bad or worse than it was in the ’60s because there are more things to become agitated about. And the people to fight those negatives are fewer because black folks don’t have that leadership, black or white, like Dr. King or the Kennedys.”
Minutes later he resets, seeking an uplifting turn: “It’s moving in a positive direction.”
When I ask him if he approves of President Trump (and his policies), Smith says, “His tenacity, but not where it’s going. Nobody thought he would be here, so you have to admire . . .” Smith stops and points his finger at me. “Now don’t you say Tommie Smith likes Trump. Any leader needs to be strong, but not to the point where he becomes a tyrant. Like Putin. Putin is a tyrant.”
Carlos lives 20 minutes south of Smith. Fifty years after sharing the podium, they could shop at the same Kroger and both fly out of Hartsfield. That has not brought them closer. “People said we would be joined at the hip,” says Smith. “That has not been the case. We’re totally different people. I’m quiet and reclusive; he says what’s on his mind. I’m an introvert; he’s an extrovert. I count to 10 before I throw a rock and then maybe I throw a Wiffle ball instead. He throws the rock.”
Between February and late June, I called Carlos half a dozen times and sent an equal number of text messages. Colleagues who know Carlos told me that he was finished doing interviews. Forever. After leaving Smith’s house, I made one last call, and Carlos answered. Then he threw some rocks.
“Tim!” he shouted into his phone. “What the hell do I have to do to get you to stop calling me? I’ve been talking about this s— for fifty years, and ain’t nothing changed since Mexico City in 1968. Nothing! I’ve spoken and spoken and spoken, and it ain’t gonna make no difference. It ain’t enough. I could die and come back in another life, and things would be the same. You have to agree with that.”
I suggest that a story might amplify his message. “You write your article in Sports Illustrated,” says Carlos. “You think that evil is defeated because people read that s—? That ain’t gonna happen, my brother.”
At 73, John Wesley Carlos is a proud and passionate man, unfiltered. A few weeks later I talked with the oldest of his three children, Kimme, who is 52. “My father is a private person,” she said. “But if you do talk with him, he will speak from the heart. It’s all on the table.” I spoke with John for 17 minutes. His initial response—it ain’t gonna make no difference—sounds at first like resignation, but it’s actually anger. Where Smith is careful and largely muted on social media, Carlos posts and shares furiously on two Facebook pages. Where Smith assiduously avoids the bullring of public discourse, Carlos seeks it, on his terms, advocating change. Last May he posted a 347-word criticism of the NFL’s anthem policy and the president’s support of that policy.
I asked Carlos why he still fights. “Look at what you have in the White House,” says Carlos. “That’s the outer layer of America. That’s the president, supplying his base. He called young black men sons of bitches for kneeling. Sons of bitches! He said they weren’t respecting the military. What did he ever do in the military? What did any of his children do in the military? And then you’ve got police officers out there shooting young black men, and nobody is prosecuted. Nobody is sent to jail. It’s the same b— today that it was fifty years ago.”
Carlos was not impolite in this exchange. He was full of life and fury. Only on the subject of Smith did he mellow ever so slightly, shifting from prose to poetry. “You look at Dr. King and Malcolm X,” says Carlos. “Each of those men had different methodologies for dealing with the complexities of society. But both came to the fight with courage. When the dust settles, okay, Tommie Smith and I walk together for eternity, but we never got the chance to be together.”
With that, Carlos ended our conversation, but for this: He added suddenly, “Hey, Tim. I’m done. That’s all I got. Okay? That’s it. Okay?”
Okay.
* * *
The Mexico City protest was not spontaneous. It was part of an 18-month movement organized by Edwards. He had been an athlete at San Jose State, and that is where he first began organizing student protests. A boycott of the 1968 Olympics by black U.S. athletes had been discussed privately, and the idea went public after Smith won two medals at the World University Games in Tokyo in September ’67, when
Smith affirmed the possibility to a Japanese reporter. In late November the vague boycott talks coalesced into the formation, under Edwards, of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which made four demands: the expulsion of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics; the removal of IOC president Avery Brundage of the United States, who had vigorously supported the awarding of the 1936 Games to Hitler’s Germany; the hiring of more black coaches at college sports programs; and the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight championship title (which had been stripped in April ’67 after he refused induction into the Army).
In late 1967, Smith and his San Jose State teammate Lee Evans, a 400-meter runner, committed to the boycott. According to an SI story that December, Smith said to Evans as they walked out of Smith’s apartment, “All I hope is that this [boycott] does some good, that it doesn’t create any chaos.”
But America was already ablaze in chaos. In the summer of 1967, there were race riots in Detroit and Newark. In January ’68, the Tet offensive fueled antiwar sentiment and spurred demonstrations. On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Two months later, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles. But despite growing frustration among African Americans, the Mexico City boycott lost steam for many reasons, not least because many athletes didn’t want to sacrifice years of training for a cause. They wanted medals.
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