by Kenny Moore
There was a quaint little tramline that got you back to the hotel in fifteen minutes. That night, Pre, Bobbie, and I happened to have a whole car to ourselves. Pre didn’t hold back. “I know I could have taken the world record if my legs were fresh,” he said. “I’m peaking perfectly. God, I wish we were racing the Olympics tomorrow! Nobody is running these times! I’m gonna kill them all. I know it. I feel it! I see it!”
His thighs were bobbing up and down. I asked him to consider the possibility that some wily vet like Tunisia’s Mohamed Gamoudi was lying in the weeds like Dellinger did before Tokyo. “Not going to happen!” he said, wholly without reservation. “I am going to win that gold medal. Silver is crap. Bronze is crap. God, if I only got a bronze I could never go home to Oregon again! I am going to win that gold medal.”
Soon after that, he came away from an interval session with a sore foot. So he had to watch when a tall, twenty-three-year-old Finn named Lasse Viren broke the world two-mile record at Bislett with 8:14.0 (passing 3000 in 7:43.6).
On August 19, we flew to Munich, bused to the impressive, banner-bedecked Olympic Village, and checked out our rooms in the United States’ fourteen-story building. Groups of four or five would share apartments. We found everything comfortable and clean. But our coach was looking far beyond our creature comforts.
Within hours of our arrival, Bowerman was doing recon—political and otherwise. His half-sister Jane’s husband, William Hall, a career diplomat, had told Bowerman to be sure to meet the American Consul in Munich. So he did. “I went over and put my card in and sat down with him and paid my respects,” Bill would remember. “He said if you have any problems, don’t hesitate to call.”
Bowerman had no immediate problems to mention, but his recon wasn’t finished. “Since the war I’d been conscious of security,” Bill would say. “So I walked around the Olympic Village and saw there was none. As guards they had boys and girls dressed in pastels or Bavarian uniforms, not one with a weapon. The back fence was nothing, six feet, chain link, no barbed wire. The Germans were trying to erase memory of Hitler and Berlin in 1936. I went to Clifford Buck, our USOC president, to whom the Oregon Track Club had sent our fat check, and said we needed some real security on our building. If we let visitors just walk in uninvited, the place would be picked apart.”
Buck told Bowerman to write him a letter, which Bill did. “We should be able to keep out,” he wrote, “thieves, harlots, and newspapermen.” Buck sent the letter on to the Olympic Village Mayor, Walther Troger, who, Bill would say, “took rather strong umbrage.” Troger informed Bowerman and others with similar concerns that the Munich Organizing Committee, under IOC member Willi Daume, was determined to minimize police or military presence. These were intended to be “The Happy Games,” the ultimate statement of how peaceful and free life was in postwar West Germany. “Let’s pray it stays that way,” said Bowerman to all and sundry.
“The Germans were outraged that one of these whippersnappers from America would say their security wasn’t good enough,” Barbara Bowerman would recall. “So they went to the International Olympic Committee and complained about Bill and from then on, Bill was caught between the IOC and the Germans. But what happened then was something that happened to Bill strangely often his whole life. Something that started out simple became a great prophecy.”
After all the pains of getting to the Games, some principled athletes, as in 1968, were prepared not to compete. The week we arrived, the IOC announced it had admitted Rhodesia to the Games, even though the nation practiced the same apartheid that made South Africa an Olympic outcast. The IOC had ruled that since Rhodesia’s all-white team traveled on British passports (being part of the British Commonwealth), they were de facto British citizens and so eligible.
Reaction was swift and furious. Most black African nations issued statements that they would boycott the Games if Rhodesia stayed. On the evening of August 19, every US black athlete entered in a meet at Kempten, 100 miles from Munich, withdrew rather than take the field with the Rhodesians. The next morning, in the US quarters in the Olympic Village, we had a tense meeting of the full men’s team. It was soon clear that our black members were united in their decision and that many whites, out of conscience or brotherhood, would support them.
“By admitting Rhodesia to the Games this way,” said Bowerman, “under the flag of Great Britain, when Rhodesia has severed all ties with Britain over the issue of white supremacy, the IOC has committed a political subterfuge. If any of our athletes feel they cannot in good conscience compete against Rhodesians, I’ll support them all the way.”
We voted that a team statement urging the IOC to expel Rhodesia be given to USOC President Clifford Buck to deliver to IOC President Avery Brundage at the IOC hotel. It was by no means sure he’d get in. “I know the temper of these aristocrats,” said 1964 Olympic coach Bob Geigengack, who’d planned the Oslo training camp and was a member of the USOC Track and Field Committee. “They will lock the door if they think they are going to be pressured.”
Buck was allowed to present the team’s appeal—barely. The IOC’s sergeant-at-arms took the letter but sent the USOC president away.
While the IOC deliberated, we athletes mulled over what we would do if they let Rhodesia compete. There was eloquence on both sides of the issue.
“I don’t have any question about which is more important,” said triple jumper Art Walker, “my jumping in sand or the inhuman treatment suffered by the ninety percent of the Rhodesian population that is nonwhite. If that team stays, I have to go.”
“I didn’t have to pass a political test to come here,” said George Woods. “I put the shot seventy feet. That’s what I’m here to do, regardless of my sympathy for oppressed people. There are so many issues we could boycott over—the Russians’ treatment of the Jews, the Nigerians’ treatment of the Biafrans, the Pakistanis’ treatment of the Bengalis . . . We’re vulnerable ourselves over our Vietnam bombing. None of our governments is pure, so let’s leave them out of it. When all those people who can’t be athletes first have gone home, I’ll be here, putting my shot.”
In the event, we didn’t have to choose. The IOC ousted Rhodesia. We were all free to be athletes first. But Avery Brundage, as would become painfully clear, would not forget.
B rundage was not the only one angry in Munich. Barbara Bowerman had made all her Olympic tour arrangements through their old friends Ehrman and Lee Giustina, who had just begun a Eugene travel agency, Lee World Travel. The Giustinas had signed up a great swath of the Oregon Track Club and other Bowerman friends across the nation, including Wade and Marie Bell. But when the group arrived in Munich, they were unmet. The Giustinas had entrusted their entire advance payments to a Bavarian agent who had taken all the money and invested it in a hotel that went broke before the Games began.
“He was being indicted for fraud,” Barbara would remember. Meanwhile, they had nowhere to stay and no Olympic tickets. Eventually, another hotel was found—and tickets, too, at the lively Marienplatz. “All our men started going off every morning,” Barbara would recall, “and every night when they came home they were more excited about who traded standing room tickets for seats on the fifty-yard line than what had happened at the track meet!”
Bill cracked that the din of ticket buying and selling in the Marienplatz was peaceful compared to what he heard as he was doing his job. “I went out to look at the marathon course with Arthur Lydiard,” he would say later. “Beautiful course. Willi Daume conceived it. But it had loose gravel on miles of paths in the two parks, Nymphenburg and the English Gardens. The IAAF rule, of course, is pavement. I said, ‘Sweep it!’ They said they’d sweep and cover the paths with a ‘special plastic.’ But three days later it was still unswept. I complained through Clifford Buck and got more people mad at me.”
Spared the brunt of these distractions, the athletes were peaking nicely. Bowerman and Dellinger timed Pre in his last tune-up, a two-mile time trial at dusk on the Post track outs
ide the stadium. It happened to be ringed with off-duty soldiers. The sight of Pre churning lap after lap got them so excited they cheered him to an American record of 8:19.4. His foot was fine. He was ready.
The early track events were eye opening, especially if you were a 5000-meter runner studying your competition while they ran the 10,000. Lasse Viren was tripped and fell hard midway through the 10,000 final, almost taking Frank Shorter down with him. Viren arose forty yards behind, gradually caught the pack and went on to win from Belgium’s Emiel Puttemans in a world record 27:38.4. Shorter ran an American record 27:51 and got but fifth. Pre sat with Dellinger and watched in silence. Viren was not ghostly and corpselike like Norpoth, but tall and ran with an eerie smoothness, the exact opposite of Pre’s chesty power. You would never have guessed that Viren had covered his last 800 in 1:56.6. “Better hope that guy has shot his wad,” Arne Kvalheim told Pre.
The occupants of our fifth-floor apartment, Anderson (whose PR of 28:34.2 didn’t quite put him in the 10,000 final), Savage, Manley, Wottle, Shorter, and I, were doing okay. Then Dave Wottle came from amazingly far back in the 800, took the lead in the last five meters from the dying, diving Yevgeny Arzhanov of the USSR, and won in 1:45.9. Dave’s parents came to the room and gave him a hard time because he had forgotten to take his golf cap off during the anthem and when he put his hand over his heart it happened to cover the “USA” on his uniform, as if he were some weird one-worlder who wanted to leave nations out of this. But we knew he was a true-blue Ohio patriot, so all-American he’d never even tasted broccoli.
In the javelin, Bill Schmidt rediscovered that perfect little keyhole in space just in time. The Munich final was a battle of titans, between Janis Lusis of the Soviet Union and Klaus Wolferman of West Germany. Wolferman won, 296 feet 10 inches to 296 feet 9 inches, that extra inch because 75,000 Germans expelled a unanimous “Whhoof!” at the moment the spear’s grip shot past Wolferman’s ear. Schmidt took the bronze with 277 feet 0 inches. “Guys tried to get into my head about hitting that gentleman,” Schmidt said later. “I told them, You know, there’s plenty of room on this spear for more notches.” Bowerman finally felt free to introduce him as “Bill the Impaler.”
Bowerman thus had stories to tell when he and Barbara slipped out of the Village for a lunch that would be a social triumph. Joining the Bowermans around the table were Mike Frankovich and Sydney Poitier and their spouses. Frankovich had been president of Columbia Pictures from 1963 to 1968, then returned to independent producing. He had maintained such respect for Bill, his erstwhile rival for Barbara’s hand, that in the early 1960s, when his son by his first marriage showed talent in the middle distances, Frankovich had sent him to Oregon—where Peter Frankovich and Jay Bowerman were fraternity brothers. He’d met his second wife, Binnie Barnes, just three years earlier. “That lunch was the only time all four of us were together,” Barbara would recall. “Binnie was a very composed British actress. I felt she was a little cool to me.”
Once the pleasantries were out of the way, Bill was mightily impressed with the competitive understanding of Sydney Poitier. “Sydney volunteered to talk to the black athletes,” Barbara would recall, “if Bill thought it was a good idea.”
Bill thought it a great idea, because by then galling snafus had been mounting. US 100-meter sprinters Rey Robinson and Eddie Hart had qualified beautifully in the first-round heats but didn’t show for the second-round quarterfinals and were eliminated. Bowerman would remember the dreadful unraveling: “The 10,000-meter heats were shifted from about 5 o’clock to 7 o’clock, and the 100-meter quarterfinals were moved forward, earlier than planned, but we weren’t notified. Stan Wright used the original schedule in telling all three of our 100-meter men when to be back.” Hart and Robinson were walking to the stadium and strolled through the press center on the way. They watched the telecast and heard the announcer say, “and in the 100 meters . . . ” At first they thought it was a replay of their heat. But that fine OTC steeplechaser, Bill Norris, who was working as a photographer, told them it was live and they’d better move. He got them to the track, but it was too late.
Bowerman was furious, but the officials were adamant. “Only our third-best, Robert Taylor, ran,” he would remember, “and went on to get the silver with 10.24 behind Valery Borzov’s 10.14. It was terribly unfair.”
There was more to come. For Jim Ryun, the two best places to run were out front or dead last. In the prelims, though, he found himself in the middle of the pack. With about 550 meters to go, he and Billy Fordjour of Ghana got tangled up and went down hard. Jim was dazed for several seconds, but then rose and sprinted after the field. Unlike Viren, however, he never had a hope of catching up. Ryun’s Olympic Games were over.
In the men’s 400-meter final, a US sweep seemed likely. Wayne Collett, John Smith, and Vince Matthews had the three best times in the world. But after 150 meters, Smith’s hamstring knotted and tore. He went down on the track clutching it. Collett, his UCLA teammate and friend, saw that and hesitated for a step. Vince Matthews powered past to win, clocking 44.66 to Collett’s 44.80.
Both immediately went to Smith, still writhing on the backstretch, helped him up, and carried him to the medical station. But this good deed meant that when they were summoned to the medal ceremony, they were neither jubilant nor dressed for it. The meet officials had taken their sweat suits with all the others to the practice track and they couldn’t get them back. So when they got up on the victory stand they were still in shorts and T-shirts.
Then, during the Star-Spangled Banner, “Matthews and Collett made asses of themselves,” as Bill would put it, “jiving around and talking, giving the impression they didn’t want to be ramrod straight. That was unfortunate but no big deal. I felt they hadn’t meant to be disrespectful during the anthem. Jesse Owens talked with them afterward and felt the same. He was arranging for them to apologize, but before they could, Brundage had Matthews and Collett suspended and sent from the Village.”
“That tore at Bill,” Barbara would say.
“You cannot expect on an Olympic squad of sixty to have everybody act like army privates,” Bill said later. “They’re great athletes. They’re great individuals. The fact that some of them did things that the press objected to didn’t bother me too much. They’re vivid, alive, human animals. They’re keenly interested, very competitive, and all different. So why not accept that and enjoy it?”
Bill wasn’t going to let the matter die. He thought maybe the American icon, Jesse Owens, who’d opposed Smith and Carlos’s gesture four years earlier, could help appeal to Brundage’s better nature. He and Wayne Collett talked further with Owens and they decided to make a pitch to the IOC Council the next day.
That night, for the only time during the Games, Bowerman left the Olympic Village and went out on the town. Barbara’s hotel put on a Bavarian dinner, so Bill didn’t go back to the Village (“feeling guilty about it,” Barbara would say) until quite late. He slipped into his ground-floor room and lay down. It seemed to him his head had just touched the pillow when there was a pounding.
Frank Shorter was the only one in our apartment five floors above who had heard anything. “I was out on our little balcony,” he recalled later. “I’d dragged my mattress out there and had been sleeping there for a week or more. I heard a sound like a door slam.” It brought him from fitful sleep to apprehensive alertness. “That’s a gunshot.” It was about 4:45 a.m.
A few minutes later came the pounding on the coaches’ door. Bowerman groggily opened it. Before him stood an Israeli racewalker, Shaul Ladany, whom Bill knew slightly because he’d trained at the Tahoe camp four years before.
“Can I come in? Can I stay here?” asked Ladany puffing, pushing close.
“What for?”
“The Arabs are in our building.”
“Well, tell them to get out.”
“They’ve shot some of our people. I got out through a window.”
“That,” said Bowerman later, “ch
anged the whole complexion.”
As he reached to draw Ladany into the safety of the room, Bowerman was the first of the US delegation to know that we had become caught up in the modern Olympics’ great loss of innocence.
Bowerman sat Ladany down on his bed, picked up the phone, and called the US Consul. “We’ve got a problem in the Olympic Village,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but I want some security.”
“What for?”
“Across the street from us, armed Arabs have moved into the Israeli quarters and we’ve got Jewish kids in our building, one the swimmer Mark Spitz and another the javelin-thrower Bill Schmidt.”
“You’ve got it.”
Thirty minutes later there were two US Marines at the US entrance and two in the halls. “We secured the building,” said Bowerman. “But I got a call about 6 a.m. from the office of the International Olympic Committee. They said you’ve done it again, Bowerman, bringing Marines in here. We want to see you first thing in the morning. I said I’d be glad to be there.”
By 7:30 a.m., German security forces had begun to flood the Village streets. What we would eventually learn was that eight members of the Black September faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, dressed in track suits and carrying rifles in sports bags, had scaled the back fence of the Village (with the unwitting aid of some American athletes sneaking in late) and forced their way into the Israeli men’s quarters in Building #31, on Connolly Strasse. They shot and killed Moshe Weinberg, a weight-lifting coach, and mortally wounded lifter Yossef Romano. They took nine other athletes and coaches hostage in the two-story duplex. Nineteen Israeli coaches and athletes, including Ladany, escaped, some out windows after wrestling official Yossef Gutfreund screamed and tried to hold the door against the invaders. Once inside, the terrorists tied and gagged their captives, took up defensive positions, and at 5:08 a.m. tossed a list of demands from the balcony to a policeman. To show their seriousness, they threw Moshe Weinberg’s body out the window onto the sidewalk.
