Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  I had met Art at a party after a track meet in California; he talked to me all night because he’s a real talker. Fortunately, since it was a party, I didn’t have to listen to him the whole time; I would listen to him for a while and then a song would come on and I would say, “I just have to dance to this song,” and I would go and dance, and when the song ended, there he was, wanting to talk some more. Later, when we talked about how we met, he would say, “You just kept going up there and doing all the dances you did, and then you would come back and talk, and then you would go and do another dance—all night!” And I would say to myself, I was doing the dances so you would go away!—not that it worked. He was a persistent man; I will give him that.

  Art was involved in getting runners—including Tommie Smith, Lee Evans, and John Carlos—to San Jose State, and once they became involved in the Project for Human Rights, he thought I should be involved too. He would call me—I didn’t have a phone in my own room; we had an old one in a phone booth at the end of the hall—and he was just amazed that the girls who would pick up the phone didn’t always know who I was. The first time he tried to reach me, he called the dorm—I don’t even know how he got the number, probably because he’s very persistent at everything—but anyway, as he put it, “I must have talked to five women, and nobody in that dorm knows who you are.”

  And I thought, Well, that’s a good thing.

  “How could they not know who Wyomia Tyus is?”

  “Because,” I told him, “they don’t give a damn. They’re not here for that. They don’t care if I won medals; that’s over. That’s done. We’re all back to what real life is all about.”

  “But everybody knows you—I just can’t believe it.”

  I tried to move him along: “But you finally got someone?”

  “Oh. Yeah. The last person I talked to—I must have talked to this girl twenty minutes on the phone, and she eventually says, ‘Oh yeah, I know who she is.’ So I said, ‘Well, could you go get her for me and tell her I’m on the phone?’”

  And that’s how I finally got to talk to Art. He called so often that everybody on the floor not only knew who I was, they also knew who he was. He kept me informed on what was happening at San Jose State, what Harry Edwards, the sociology professor, was saying, what they thought they might do. He would call and say, “They did this” and “They were talking about that” and “You need to know these things!”

  “Well, okay,” I would say, “but I’m in Nashville, Tennessee. And I don’t see anybody coming down here to organize us.”

  That didn’t bother Art. “They’re talking about not going to the Olympics,” he told me one day.

  “Okay.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean, what do I think?”

  “They’re saying they’re not going to go because of all the unrest and violations of human rights.” He meant things like Jim Crow laws here in the US and apartheid in South Africa and all the other injustices that were going on at that time.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Well, are you going to join them? Because I could tell them if you’re going to join them.”

  “No,” I replied. “You can’t tell them I’m going to join them because I don’t think they can make those kinds of decisions right now. They need to make the team. If they don’t make the team, they’re not going to go anyway.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “Only you would say something like that. Only you. You put a damper on everything.”

  “That’s not a damper. That’s something to really think about.”

  “Have you been talking to Coach Temple?”

  “Are you saying I don’t have a brain? Because I have a brain.” I didn’t have to talk to Mr. Temple. I’d talked to Mr. Temple from the time I was fifteen; I knew what he would say, and on a lot of questions—not all—I believed the same things he did. He always said that you have to think things through before you speak out. Saying that you’re going to boycott a party when you haven’t even gotten an invitation wouldn’t make much sense to Mr. Temple, and it didn’t make much sense to me, either.

  “Look,” I told him, “Mr. Temple is not calling us into the office and saying, ‘You can’t do this,’ or, ‘You can’t do that.’”

  I didn’t tell him that what Mr. Temple did do was hold a meeting, and at that meeting he said, “Look. They’re talking about boycotting the Olympics. It is not something I would do, but if it’s something you really feel strongly about doing, you know what you have to do. That is up to you. But I can tell you this: you can’t boycott the Olympics until you make the team. And another thing I have to tell you is that the press is calling here and asking all these questions, but we don’t know anything from the people involved. All we know is what the press tells us. We don’t know if they’re quoting Smith right, or Evans right, or Carlos right. We just know what the press says they’re saying. You have to make your own decisions. But if they call my office, I am not going to go get you out of class to talk to them. And you don’t have to call them back. If they really want to talk to you, they can come down here and talk to you. If they really want to know how you feel and how you’re thinking, they can come down here and ask.”

  Of course, Art was giving me information long before the press called and would tell me about the things that Professor Edwards and Tommie and Lee and Carlos said they were going to do. But none of them called any of us. They called each other. They talked to themselves. And I understand—kind of, sort of: you’re there, and you’re talking about what you want to do. But you can’t make a statement for everybody: “This is what we’re all doing.”

  According to Mr. Temple, one of the reporters who talked to him said, “This is what they said they’re going to do, and they said the women are going along with it. Is that true?”

  “You would have to talk to the women about that,” Mr. Temple answered. “You would have to talk to them.”

  But that was the press. When it came to the people involved, no one even bothered to try to talk to us. I don’t fault them for not calling, but I fault them for assuming that we would go along with whatever they wanted. Because that’s not right. How can you speak for a group of people? You don’t want anyone speaking for you—that was one of the reasons people were protesting, one of the reasons there was so much unrest: because some people were always speaking for everybody else. Maybe we would have supported their plans if we had known all the hows and whys. But that reaching out to us never happened. Mr. Temple was getting all the calls, and all those calls were from the press—except, of course, the calls I got from Art.

  And then when we went to a meet, this is how the press would address us: “Smith, Carlos, and Edwards say the boycott is on. What do you think?” Sometimes they just said: “Are you going along with the plan?”

  And I would say, “Well, no.”

  “You’re not?!” They would act all surprised.

  “No one has said anything to me. So I’m not going along with anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But they said the women would go along.”

  “Well, then that’s what they said. No one here said that. And you need to talk to more women. I’m just one person. I can’t speak for anybody else.”

  That was a big point of contention between Art and me. He would always say, “You know they’re right. You know what they want to do is right.”

  “Yes,” I would say, “I’m not saying they’re not right. I’m just saying that nobody is talking to me. You’re talking to me. You figured out how to contact me. But nobody else has.” Contacting us women was the furthest thing from their minds. I know that. But that didn’t make it right. It didn’t give them the right to speak for me—or to think for me or to speak or think for any of us. I don’t think they were very organized—not to the point that they could organize us. But I can’t say; I shouldn’t because I wasn’t with them.


  The other problem was that, according to Mr. Temple, most of the time the press would quote Harry Edwards, the professor, and then they would quote one of the athletes, Tommie or Lee or whoever. And the closer it got to the Olympics, the more urgently they would ask Mr. Temple, “What are you going to do? What are your girls going to do?”

  “You’ll have to talk to them, and you might as well wait until they go to the Olympic Trials and come back. Once they make the team, you should talk to them.”

  But, of course, even after we made the team, no one asked us anything. And that was not the only issue the women’s Olympic track team had to deal with.

  Chapter 6.

  Spiders and Fires and Bombs

  As much as I was not leading in the movement, I was leading on the track: 1965 was one of my best years for running, and I set most of my records then. On an indoor track at Madison Square Garden in New York City, I broke the record for the 60-yard dash and almost every other indoor record there was. I had a great year. Not that I was cocky; I just felt good every time I stepped on the track. I don’t attribute that to the fact that I had won the Olympic medals but to where I was in my life and how I felt about my accomplishments—not just participating in the Olympics, but being able to come back and go to school and continue to grow as a human being. I grew even more than I had in ’64—getting bigger, as Mr. Temple would say.

  Which was good because, heading into the ’68 Olympics, the pressure was on. No one—no person, man or woman, not in the seventy-two years the men had been competing at the Olympics or the forty years women had been competing in track and field at the Olympics—had ever gone back-to-back in the 100 meters before, and I was not thinking that I would be the first; that was not in my consciousness. Even Mr. Temple told me, “It’s going to be hard. Everybody’s gunning for you.”

  Not only that, but the year prior to ’68, two things happened to me that made it seem like I might never go back to the Olympics at all. I’d never pulled a muscle or sprained an ankle or been injured in any way before ’67, but in that year, when I was out in Los Angeles for a meet, I got bitten by a spider on the lower part of my leg. I didn’t feel it when it happened, but after about two weeks I kept noticing a blister, and the blister kept getting larger and larger. Being the doctor that I am, I kept popping that blister, thinking that I must have burned myself somehow, maybe on one of the radiators in the dorms.

  After about a month or so, though, it still hadn’t healed. In fact, it had stopped being a blister and had become something else: a thin layer of skin had grown over it, and you could tell that underneath something was happening. We finally went to the doctor, and he said it was a spider bite that had turned into an ulcer and was eating its way in. I was horrified. I wondered what would happen if it ate all the way to the bone. But the doctor just said to stay off it—stay off it completely—not puncture it anymore, and quit trying to be the doctor that I was not.

  It started off that I had to rest for two weeks, and then I went back to practice, but my leg had not healed, so we went back to the doctor, who said, “She needs to be completely off her leg until it heals. The only thing she can do is go to class. And when she’s in class, she needs to have her leg elevated.”

  Mr. Temple was okay with that, but he kept asking, “How long is this going to be?” As it turned out, it took just over a month. That spider bite was ugly and kind of scary. I still have a scar, a circle where my skin is very thin. But eventually it healed. It took its time, but it did heal.

  Then, when I was finally allowed to go back to practice, I had another mishap: I was taking a class in camping and outdoor education, and one night when we had a campfire, somebody threw a paper on it, and a wind came up, blew the paper onto my other leg—the one without the spider bite—and burned the whole front part of my ankle. Then that was blistering, and it was very difficult to move it, and it took a long time for it to heal and for me to be able to practice. Of course, I still had to go to practice, even with my injury; I had to show up to the track for moral support and all that, so I was out there with my foot up, watching the others train.

  When I started running again, I was not my fast self. I was there, I was running, but I had kind of lost sight of the Olympics. I started thinking, I already won my gold medal; why do I need to go to the Olympics again? Somebody else can have that spot. Because going back knowing that you’re not in top form is not something you want to do. And I wasn’t anywhere near top form. At the trials for the ’67 Pan American Games, I didn’t even qualify for the 100. I ran so poorly that, after the race, Mr. Temple said to me, “We’re going back to campus and we’re just going to work and work and work.”

  Oh no, I thought, that’s not going to happen. Everyone else would either make the team and start practicing with the Pan American Games team coach or go home. If we went back to Tennessee State, it would be just him and me. He would be sitting under a shade tree, barking orders, and I would be out there running and sweating in that hot sun. No way, I told myself. I am not going back there to practice alone with him and have him hold this race over me.

  So I said, “But Mr. Temple—I still have the 200.”

  “No. We’re going to pull you out of the 200. You already look bad enough.” You may remember that Mr. Temple had always wanted me to run the 200, but in ’67, at the Pan American trials, he wanted to pull me out, and that gives you a sense of how badly I was running.

  I didn’t give up. “But I can make the team in the 200, Mr. Temple.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense for you to run the 200. You can’t get down the track in the 100. You’ve got next year to think about, and you need to get yourself together. We’re just going to go back, and we’re going to work out.”

  “Okay, Mr. Temple,” I said, “that sounds good, but could I just run in the 200? Don’t pull me out. Can I just run in this race and see where I am? And then maybe we can see how much work I have to do?” I had finally found a reason to say more than just a few words.

  Eventually, Mr. Temple agreed. “Okay, Tyus,” he said. “But I think it’s awful, watching you do that—that you even want anybody to see you running so badly. That 100 was enough.”

  “Okay, Mr. Temple. Just let me run it.”

  And he did. And I won. Because I said, to myself, I am not going to return to Tennessee and run all summer with him like this. That was not going to work out for me. So I just decided that things would go differently. The fact that I was mostly by myself and not talking—the fact that I talked to myself constantly, in my head, and was always thinking things through—helped me to have a psychological edge. I don’t know exactly where it comes from. But for me, with most things, if I sit and think about it, I can talk myself into it. Now that I’m older, it comes much more slowly, but when I was young, it used to come to me right away, like: This is it. This is how it should be, and this is how it is going to be. And I’m usually right on it. I can make it happen. Not all the time. But usually.

  That wasn’t always enough for Mr. Temple, though. Even after I won that 200, he said, “You still didn’t look that good.”

  “But I won something that I don’t run, Mr. Temple. I don’t even like the 200. So that means that I’m getting better. I just don’t have the quick speed right now for the 100. And that’s okay because I won’t be running the 100 in the Pan American Games.”

  “I just don’t know, Tyus. I just don’t know.”

  “I can do it, Mr. Temple. I am telling you: I can do it.”

  I knew I had to do it, so I went to the Pan American Games in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I won the 200—just like I told him I would do. It made a big mess of the 4x100 relay because, on a team like the Olympic team or the Pan American Games team, they can make up the relays in a couple of ways. They can say that the first four in the 100 will be the relay people. Or they can say one and two in the 100 and one and two in the 200 can make up the relay team. There are a lot of different ways, and it depends on the coac
h. Because I got fifth or something like that in the 100 at the trials, the Pan American team coach thought I shouldn’t be on the relay team. I thought my winning the 200 might change that, but it didn’t. Okay, I thought, I’m all right with that.

  But Mr. Temple was not. “What kind of craziness is that? That’s not how it’s going to be,” he said, and he went to bat for me even though I told him it was okay.

  Then when we got to Winnipeg and were training, they could see that I was improving, and suddenly they wanted me for the relay. But I wouldn’t do it. They were upset with me, and I didn’t care. “No thank you,” I said. “You have the four people who won the 100, and that’s what you said you were going to do.”

  So I didn’t run the relay; I was only there for the one race, so I just had fun. Mr. Temple supported me. “You should have nothing to do with them,” he said. “They didn’t want you in the beginning, they don’t need you now. Let them run with the girls they chose. If they lose, they just lose.”

  They did lose, as it turned out. Barbara Ferrell won gold in the 100 and silver in the 200, but the relay team did not place; they got beaten by Cuba, Canada, and Jamaica.

  * * *

  All that was my prelude going into ’68. But then, after all that, once it got to be ’68, my thinking changed; I went from doubting myself to thinking I could win to knowing I could win. I’m going back as the defending champion, I thought. I can do this. First, I convinced myself that everybody else in the race should be afraid of me because I was returning; I had nothing to be scared of. Then I saw my competition at the meets leading up to the Olympics, and I didn’t think any of those women could beat me. Of course, I had to keep myself on point because reporters and other people who talked to me would ask, “Don’t you feel old?”

  “I’m only twenty-three!” I would say. But I knew what they were thinking: twenty-three is old for a sprinter. Wilma Rudolph, you may recall, was twenty-three or twenty-four when Mr. Temple made her retire. Even so, part of that had nothing to do with running. When we were in college, Mr. Temple would stress that while you needed to do the things you needed to do on the track, you also needed to get your education, leave college, and get a job. Your time of competition was going to end, and you had to be prepared.