Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  “What’d you do in your class?” he would ask me.

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “What are you doing in class?”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “You sure? Did you talk with your teacher? I want you talking with your teachers every day.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you hear what I’m saying to you, Tyus? That’s the only way you’re going to be able to stay here.”

  “I can do it,” I told him. “I can.” And I was thinking that if I could just get C’s, that would be okay with me.

  But he wanted us to want more. “The way you apply yourself on the track,” he would say, “is how you got to apply yourself in your classes. We can’t babysit you forever. You’ve got to do it. You can do it. That’s why I put you in the room with Marcella!”

  Marcella Daniel was my roommate that first year in college. She was a sophomore from Panama, and she made good grades. She was not like other girls on the team who did really well, but she had great study habits; she studied all the time, stayed up all night, reading and cramming. Her being my roommate, being who she was and doing what she did, was all part of Mr. Temple’s plan. He paired me up with Marcella so that I could get the help he thought I needed. But I didn’t believe Marcella could help me. We were too different. She followed all the rules while I just followed the ones that made sense to me. She was very good at studying, and I was not. She would go to the library every day, and she would take me with her, and I would wander around.

  “Come sit with me,” she would say, and I would try for a while. The problem was that it was too quiet in the library. If I studied in our room and there was noise going on outside, I did much better, because at least I could get up and go see what it was and then go back. It would break the monotony. Also, I did much better if someone else was in the same class with me, and we could talk about what we read. That whole just-sitting-there-reading thing did not work for me.

  I finally kind of somewhat got it by the end of the year. I kept on saying I could do it, and eventually I did. It was a big breakthrough for me. At that point, I realized that I had put my father’s death and not having him aside—not all the way aside, but I could finally let myself remember the times I had spent with him. During my first year in the summer program, I had started to see that there was something else I could do besides sit around Griffin, missing my dad. I could do something more, which was what he had wanted. Sometimes I would fall back to thinking that nothing I did mattered because he wasn’t there to see it. The next step was convincing myself that he did see it; I just didn’t see him seeing it. And so on. And finally I was able to think: If I can come to terms with my father’s death then I can do well enough at school to not be sent home.

  And soon I was back to where I should have been. I had learned how to be a college student—though I had to learn it again every year. With school and track, you couldn’t really have much of a social life, which was difficult. If someone said, “They’re having a party—would you like to come?” I had to say, “I can’t go. I got to study.” No one could stay out late, of course—we had curfews. That was for all the freshmen, not just the Tigerbelles. All the girls, that is—the women. The men didn’t have that. But we were in a dorm situation; you had to sign in and sign out. You could have male visitors, but you had to sit and talk with them in the lobby, or go outside, and that was it. Nobody could come upstairs or be in your room, not even with the doors open.

  For Mr. Temple, this was a good thing; it was part of being “ladylike.”

  “First of all,” he would say, “if you’re running track, people look at you totally different. They look at it more as a male sport than a female sport. You’re always going to get comments and things, so you need to be as ladylike as possible.”

  Whatever “ladylike” meant. We knew that it meant that you had to carry yourself a certain way, no cussing or fussing or fighting out in the street, always acting the way you were raised up to act. You had to dress up like you were going to church to go anywhere, that whole Southern thing. If you look at pictures of when the Tigerbelles traveled as a team, you can see that we were always decked out in our finest. That was a big part of the program. Tigerbelles had to dress up to get on a plane. That was it. We had to conform to the social idea of what it meant to be a lady—or at least Mr. Temple’s idea of what it meant. Although it is true that most of the Tigerbelles enjoyed dressing up; I might have been the only one who would have preferred to wear jeans.

  How to dress up was one of the things that the older girls taught you, from wearing stockings to having immaculate hair, which for Black women in those days meant pressing our hair all the time—straight and fried. There were always girls on the team that did hair; Evelyn, one of my roommates and a good friend, did hair. It was a big thing for us, for all the women at Tennessee State, but especially the Tigerbelles, because we ran every day, even in the rain. You’re out there working out and sweating, and you have to care how your hair looked? I don’t think so. But when you went on a trip, you had to have your hair looking great. When we went to Europe, we would take those little Sterno cans—can you imagine doing that today? You would light them up and use them to heat your straightening comb, and that’s how you did your hair when you were in Europe. And you would hope that you didn’t get on the wrong side of the girl that did hair because you wouldn’t have a good hairdo if you did—or they wouldn’t do your hair at all.

  At the time, I thought that was part of growing up, part of being in the college life. But now I know that, mostly, wearing dresses and doing your hair was part of living in the South. That was when the Afro was popular, though with certain teachers at Tennessee State, you could not wear an Afro. If you had an Afro, you went into their classroom with a scarf or a hat on your head. That’s what you had to do. And this was at an all-Black college—a Historically Black University (HBU). And then there were the teachers who didn’t want women to wear pants to class. I had a Saturday-morning class at eight o’clock and I could not go in pants. I had to wear a dress—just like when I was a little girl in Griffin. But it was in the winter months, and the way I got around it was to wear my trench coat and have my shorts on underneath—cutoff jeans. Because I was not going to put on a dress if I didn’t have to. I hadn’t changed that much. I just sat there with my long coat on the whole time, and the teacher never knew.

  Representing Tennessee, but not yet a Tigerbelle. (Photo courtesy of Tennessee State University Athletics.)

  * * *

  If you look at pictures of my early running, you’ll see that I had on a T-shirt that said Tennessee. It doesn’t say Tigerbelles. Mr. Temple had criteria for being a Tigerbelle, and you needed to meet his criteria if you wanted that T-shirt. You could be on the team, and you could say, “I’m with the Tigerbelles,” but we knew that if you were not wearing that Tigerbelle T-shirt, you were not truly a Tigerbelle yet.

  To be one of Mr. Temple’s Tigerbelles, you definitely had to have good grades—that was number one. And you had to do well on the track. You didn’t have to be a superstar, but you had to contribute something positive to the team at all times.

  “My girls do everything,” Mr. Temple would say. “There are girls on our team who have excellent grades, and there are girls running much faster than those girls, but they’re all doing well at something. They’re not just track athletes. They can be brain surgeons. They can be Miss Tennessee State University.”

  We had a diverse team, and everyone contributed. The girls who were A students kept the team’s average up. My roommate Marcella, who studied all the time? She was also the one who was Miss Tennessee State. That helped us too; people thought it was good for our “image.” The fact that everybody felt they could make a contribution was one of the things that made Mr. Temple’s program successful.

  Another reason Mr. Temple was so successful was because nobody else was doing what he was doing—hardly anyone else was even trying to have a women’s prog
ram in track and field at all. Tuskegee had a program, and then Hawaii started a program, but it was not that big, and then, finally, Texas Southern started a program. But Mr. Temple was one of the few coaches who had the charisma and ability to convince parents to let their daughters run track. And once they did, he had the ability and fortitude to say to the girls, “You could be more than just a track star. This could propel you into your future. Track opened the doors for you, but education will keep them open.”

  He gave us a dream—something to look forward to. Most of us were coming from poor families, big families; I think Edith and I may have been the only girls on the team in the beginning who came from families of four children. Most of them came from families of nine, ten—even thirteen or fourteen. Girls wanted to get out of that and make a better life for themselves, and their parents wanted the same. Mr. Temple gave them that opportunity. He saw possibilities for women way before Title IX—in fact, Mr. Temple used to say that his program was Title IX before Title IX. He had a vision, and he let us see it too.

  Even so, his becoming a coach was almost by accident. He went to Tennessee State for college, and he was on the track team and the football team. When he came out of school, he and his wife Charlie B. got married, and he needed a job, so they hired him to run the post office on campus. Then he needed another job because that one wasn’t paying enough, and when the job coaching women’s track opened, he took it. So it was kind of just by chance. But he was the kind of person who made it work—with all the odds against him. Not only was he coaching women, he was doing it at a school that was not behind him or behind women’s sports in general.

  Walter Davis was the president when Mr. Temple first started there, though he went through a number of them. That’s what he always used to say: “I’ve been through a lot of presidents.” Davis didn’t support the program in the sense that he was not going to take away any of the scholarships from the football team or the basketball team to give to the Tigerbelles. Tennessee State had a great basketball team, a great football team, and a great baseball team. They had people who made the NBA, people who were on Super Bowl teams, and I don’t know how many people who played baseball in the Major Leagues. Our band—the Aristocrats—was number one for years, and the Tennessee State and Florida A&M bands were always competing in the Battle of the Bands, which to us was the show of all shows—some people would come more for the halftime show than the games. All of these things were part of being at Tennessee State. In addition to being a great place to have your college experience and get a good education, it was a big sports school, so we were competing with all those other programs for funding and attention.

  Fortunately, Mr. Temple was someone who could get a lot done with limited resources. One more thing that made him successful was the way he encouraged competition and the kind of competition he encouraged: competition with support—and loyalty. We all felt that if we were going to get beat by anybody, it might as well be a Tigerbelle. There was never any shame in that. There were a lot of girls who didn’t get to wear the Tigerbelle T-shirt, but nobody talked about it. It was competitive, but competition and camaraderie were intertwined. I don’t know exactly how Mr. Temple managed to make it so. But no matter how competitive it got, it was never that you hated each other, and I feel that he was responsible for that.

  Part of it was his whole method of having the older girls helping the younger ones. The older girls knew, firsthand, what we younger girls were going through, and they knew Mr. Temple. It made us feel that we were all in it together. It also helped that in general he didn’t play favorites—although we all felt that Wilma was his favorite. You could see the connection between the two of them. But that was nothing to us. He never stated that she was his favorite, and he never did anything special for her that he wouldn’t do for us. In those early years, after my father died, he was a father figure to me, and he was definitely that for her too, though our relationship was different; she was always hugging him, and I would never do that. If I did well at something, Mr. Temple would say to me, “Tyus, you did a good job,” and give me a slap on my back, and I would say, “Thank you.” That was our relationship. He had a different relationship with each of us because we were all different people.

  No matter how different we were, however, we all wanted to be Tigerbelles. For me, the Tigerbelles were the essence of being a woman who was going places and getting things done. It wasn’t just about being able to run—you had to have goals in life and you had to be able to talk to people. “And not,” Mr. Temple would always tell me, “just sit up there and not talk—like you, Tyus.”

  He used to get on me all the time about my not talking. He would make me sit by him on trips so that he could talk to me, thinking that would get me to start talking more. You’re the one who does all the talking, I would say to myself. I’m just listening. Still, I understood that Mr. Temple wanted me to be able to express myself, and that he wanted it for me—because he knew that it would help me later in life. Everything he wanted was for his girls. He wanted us to do well, and we could feel it.

  Not that we always did do well. If you did something that he was not pleased with, he would call you into his office, and you did not want to go to his office. Yet as much as he criticized, he also gave you your accolades. He would talk about how promising you were, and how well you were doing, and if you weren’t doing all that great on the track, he would say, “Well, you’re not doing so good now, but you’ll come around. You’ll have to work hard, but you know that you can contribute to the team in other ways.”

  One way the older girls could contribute had nothing to do with the track or getting good grades. It was to help out the ones who had less by taking them shopping—not by buying things for them, but by showing them what things to buy and how to look for bargains. Mr. Temple would help us with those kinds of things too; if we broke a record, sometimes he would take us to buy dress shoes and things like that. My mom couldn’t give me all the things I needed to fit in at college, and I was not the only one. Every year I went to school, I would come a couple days before the quarter started in September, and Mr. Temple’s wife Charlie B. would take me to town and buy me two or three outfits and a big coat, so that I would have something to wear.

  Mrs. Temple had a lot to do with those kinds of things. Mr. Temple was used to having a lot of women around him, but when it came to talking about clothes and female problems, he would say, “You need to talk to Charlie B.” He had female assistant coaches in the summer—Mrs. Perkins, who I’ve mentioned, was also a teacher at one of the high schools in Atlanta—and they would help out with those kinds of things too, but that was just in the summer. The rest of the time, it was Mrs. Temple. After meets, Mr. Temple would bring home our uniforms, and she would clean them. She would also make German chocolate cake for us on our birthdays. She was not a person I would open up to—I barely talked to her husband. But she was always on me, just like he was. “Tyus, you need to talk more,” she would say, and when I came up early to buy my clothes, she would ask, “Do you like this?”

  “Yes, that’s fine.”

  “But what is it that you really like?”

  “What you bought me is what I really like.”

  She wasn’t any better than he was at getting me to talk. Still, she was a big influence. She was not liked by everyone, but we all knew she was there for us, and she was always there for Mr. Temple. When she passed away in March 2008, Mr. Temple had three different generations of Tigerbelles speak at the service, and I was one of them. It was very difficult for me because I had just lost my mom too, but I got up and I said to the people in the church, “One thing that I have to say to Mrs. Temple is, thank you for letting your husband hang out with fast women.”

  We could be like that, because it was like a family, and it was a family that I pretty much needed at that time. My dad was gone, and Mr. Temple was there for me. I didn’t so much see Mrs. Temple as a mom, but I did see Mr. Temple as a dad—looking out for me
. Not everybody appreciated him like I still do or like Edith does. There were girls on the team who really didn’t care for him. I don’t understand some of it. You went to school and you got an education, free, because of this man, but you’re angry because of something he said in the whole course of the four or five years that you were there, and you let it come between you? And when they say, “Well, he could have done more,” I think, Yeah, well, he could have done a lot of things. But he did what he could do. Of course, he didn’t pull punches. He never did. He said what he said, and sometimes it was not the best thing. Sometimes Mr. Temple would say things, and you would think, Oh God, he didn’t just say that, did he?

  Not that he was ever trying to put anyone down; it was just him. He was so real. I can remember one of the girls having trouble with her weight. He rarely put me on the scale—I was always too skinny—but some of the girls had to weigh in, and if he saw you gaining weight, he would say something. One girl was having trouble with shin splints, and he told her, “Well, what do you expect if you put a car on a tricycle?”

  And when he showed those training films, he would say the first thing that came into his head, and it wasn’t always the kindest thing. But he would talk about the good things too. He would show films of the older girls running in meets where there were eight people on the track and six of them were Tigerbelles, and he would say, “That could be you. You could be one of those Tigerbelles.”

  And I knew that’s what I wanted to be. And I knew how I wanted to get there: sprinting. The distances were 100, 200, and 400, and at that time, 400 seemed like a mile to me. But it didn’t matter because I was not going to run the 400 nor the 200 either. All I wanted was to run the 100 and be on the 4x100 relay team.

  Mr. Temple had a different idea; he wanted all his sprinters to run the 100, the 200, and the relay. He tried to convert me to that race from the start, but I wouldn’t. Or I would, but it was like pulling teeth. And I didn’t care if I won. He would say, “You’re a good 200 runner. You need to do that race.”