Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  The Black September spokesman went by the name Issa and said he’d graduated from technical school in Berlin. The terrorists wanted the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israel and the Bader-Meinhof gang from German prison. They said they’d start killing captives at 9 a.m. if there were no releases. West German Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told Issa he’d have to talk to both the Israeli and German governments and couldn’t promise an answer in the 21⁄2 hours until 9. Issa said that would be too bad for the hostages.

  West German Chancellor Willy Brandt called Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and relayed the Black September demands. Her response was short: “Under no conditions will Israel make the slightest concession to terrorist blackmail.” The captives’ families knew this would be the answer. The captives surely knew as well.

  The Israeli position never changed. But the Germans, to buy time, didn’t tell the terrorists. They kept saying the prisoners couldn’t be located or that Israeli cabinet ministers were out of touch. Issa let the 9 a.m. deadline pass and reset it for noon, then 3 p.m.

  Meanwhile, the area around Building #31 was sealed off. Tanks and troops took up positions out of sight behind myriad concrete walls and corners. But the Games themselves, said Munich Olympic Organizing Committee President Willi Daume, would continue until further notice.

  News was slow to spread. In the early hours, before people fully understood the horror of the situation on Connolly Strasse, the machinery of the Games and the Village ground on, or tried to. So Bowerman, even though the place was becoming an armed camp, had to go to have his hand slapped by the IOC bureaucracy for bringing in a few Marines.

  “I had one lucky break,” Bowerman would recall. “Jesse Owens came by to help with the 400-meter situation. He went with me to the IOC staff office, too. They were, therefore, very polite.”

  The IOC people said they’d had a complaint from Mayor Troger’s people about the fact that Bowerman had secured his building. Bowerman asked if they were aware of what had happened early that morning. “We have heard some rumor there has been some trouble with, with—whatever do you call them? The PLO or the Arabs?”

  “Well,” Bill answered, “I had an Israeli come into my quarters. When he told me what the problem was, I called the US Consul. And if it’s trouble to secure a building when people are being killed, then I guess I’m trouble.”

  The staffers said they would look into this killing rumor further, but they understood his action. Bowerman and Owens escaped to try to reason with Avery Brundage.

  This they did in the early afternoon, successfully petitioning to be heard by the IOC president and council members at their hotel. It was a small meeting, and Bowerman thought the IOC officials must not have been fully aware of the seriousness of the Palestinian terrorism because they were so focused on the quarter-milers’ controversy.

  In fact, Brundage had been constantly conferring with the German crisis team. He’d even suggested the 1920s Chicago police tactic of pumping knockout gas into buildings to overpower gangsters. The IOC president’s ability to continue caring about runner decorum with Bowerman suggests a bizarre ability to compartmentalize. Or it suggests that Brundage, following the protests of 1968, was terrified of any further political use of the victory stand.

  Brundage expressed his displeasure over Matthews and Collett. “He was very upset about this,” Bowerman would say. “He wanted to know if I would apologize. I said sure. I said after all, they’re here as terrific, bright young men representing their country. They just won the race of their lives. They’re black. They’re making a black salute or whatnot. They meant no offense. But if it offended you and you want me to apologize, by all means, please accept my apology.”

  Bowerman and Owens were pleased to see that both the council and Brundage swiftly accepted it. The suspensions would be lifted; Matthews and Collett would be permitted to run the 1600-meter relay—provided that the USOC also agreeed to the decision.

  Bowerman, Owens, and Collett hustled to USOC headquarters with the news and walked into a raucous meeting. “It was a mob in there,” Bowerman would say, “Clifford Buck presiding.” Bill told them he and Jesse Owens had just been to the IOC and cleared the way for Matthews and Collett’s reinstatement. Buck replied that the USOC had already taken a vote. “The people involved in this episode,” he said, “will not be able to run on the relay.”

  “I don’t know how you reached that conclusion,” said Bill.

  “Well,” said Buck, “they insulted the American flag.”

  And there it ended. “They were not prepared to listen,” said Bowerman later, “to any explanation or apology from Wayne and Vince, or me. Avery Brundage and the stuffy IOC hierarchy had accepted my explanation. It was only our own USOC which would not.” There would be no US entry in the 1600-meter relay. Lee Evans’s “surest gold on the team” had evaporated. He would never get to race a step in Munich.

  Of course it didn’t look like the rest of us would either. From our little balcony where Frank had heard the shots, Shorter, Anderson, Savage, Manley, and I could see tanks, troops, and emergency vehicles assembling 150 yards away, behind the blocky structure that housed the Israelis. We took turns on the terrace all day, nervously plucking seeds from a fennel plant there, grinding them into our palms, keeping vigil.

  “Imagine how it must be for them in there,” said Frank. “Some maniac with a machine gun saying, ‘Let’s kill ’em now,’ and another one saying, ‘No, let’s wait a while.’ How long could you stand that?”

  Below, people played chess or ping-pong. The trading of Olympic pins continued. Athletes sunbathed by the reflecting pool. It seemed inappropriate, but what was one supposed to do? The scratchy, singsong notes of European police sirens sounded incessantly. Rumors leaped and died. There were twenty-six hostages. There were seven. The terrorists were killing a man every two hours. They were on the verge of surrender.

  At 3 p.m. the dissonance between oblivious sport and imminent death finally became too great for the Olympic organizers. A friend in the press village called and said, “Have you heard? The Games are stopped.”

  “Stopped? You mean postponed or canceled?”

  “Postponed for now. But they say it may be impossible to start them again.”

  I went back to the room, where Bobbie was waiting, and wept. I experienced level after level of grief: for the dead and doomed Israelis; for the marathon, those years of preparation now useless; and for the violated sanctuary of the Games. Until now, in my twenty-ninth year, I had believed the Olympics immune to the threats of the larger world. It was an illusion, but it had been the strongest of my life. I shook and sobbed as it was shattered.

  I was not alone. Steve Prefontaine raged at the terrorists’ blindness, at what he felt was their sheer, malignant gall. “These are our Games,” he cried. “Anyone who would murder us for some demented cause just proves he can’t understand what it is we do!”

  When the Germans demanded that Issa prove that the hostages were still alive, Interior Minister Genscher and Mayor Troger were escorted to the second-floor room of Apartment 1 to verify it. “It was awful,” Troger said later. “There was blood and they looked desperate. It was not easy to know that I couldn’t do very much for them.”

  Would Troger reflect on Bowerman’s warning to him about the Village’s lax security? The haunted face he displayed in a 2002 ABC documentary suggested he had for thirty years.

  German police needed to know how many terrorists there were. Troger emerged thinking there were, at most, five. There were eight. The Germans readied an amateurish team of riflemen in sweat suits to come down the air-shafts from the roof into the building. But as they were about to begin the assault, the terrorists became observably nervous and it was called off. Then the Germans realized why. The ABC TV feed from a camera high on the tower over the Village was showing the track-suited riflemen on the roof. The terrorists had been watching their every move. The Germans would have been slaughtered.
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  The terrorists pushed back the deadline to 5 p.m. Just before that hour, Issa demanded a plane out to an Arab country. The Germans, under enormous pressure from Brundage to get this horrible struggle out and away from the precincts of peace, jumped at the plane idea, even though standard procedure for hostage situations is to contain and delay. They brought in two helicopters to take the terrorists and hostages to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, from where, they falsely promised, a Lufthansa 727 would take the terrorists to Cairo and then deliver the hostages to Tel Aviv, Israel.

  At 9 p.m., Bobbie and I tried to leave the Village. At the gates, the guards were letting no one in or out. Assistant coach Hoover Wright and his wife were also trying to get out. Someone who knew him shouted from the crowd, “Hoover, there’s going to be shooting! There’s going to be shooting.” We went back through rising furor to the room.

  After a few minutes, Dave Wottle came in from, to our amazement, a run. “I went out the back gate,” he said. He’d covered a three-mile loop and returned to the rear of the Village, where his way was barred by ropes. He jumped them, and then the fence. “I heard some guards yelling ‘halt’ but I just waved without looking. After fifty yards I came to another group of guards. One recognized me and said, ‘It’s Wottle,’ and they laughed.” When Dave looked back, he saw five guards returning guns to holsters. “If I’d known they were so jumpy, I’d have walked around all night.”

  From the balcony a little after 10 p.m. we saw two large Iroquois helicopters lift off, wheel around, and disappear into roiling clouds reddened by searchlights. Shorter watched the sky long after the rest of us had finished our prayers for the Israelis’ deliverance. “You know,” he said with shaken softness, “I don’t think it’s over.”

  At Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, the German authorities were hastily preparing an ambush. Snipers knelt on three sides of the tarmac. A team of seventeen Bavarian and Munich policemen was assigned to be in the waiting plane, some hiding, some impersonating the pilot and crew. When Issa inspected the plane, as they assumed he would, they would kill him and the snipers would shoot the other terrorists.

  All went wrong. There were only five snipers but eight terrorists. Worse, the helicopters would land precisely between two sets of snipers, so few could shoot without hitting others. Still worse, on the waiting 727, the German police team leader, Reinhold Reich, realized that their partial Lufthansa uniforms would fool no one. He polled his sixteen officers, who voted unanimously to abandon what they felt was a suicide mission. Everyone ran off the plane just before the helicopters landed at 10:35 p.m.

  Issa and another terrorist did inspect the waiting plane, saw it was empty, and jogged back toward the helicopters. The German snipers began firing, killing two terrorists and wounding a third. The terrorists quickly shot out the field lights. The snipers had no night-vision goggles. For a chaotic hour, shots were exchanged in the dark.

  The Germans failed to move in more forces. A police assault-team helicopter landed a mile away and sat there. Six armored personnel carriers coming by road got stuck in traffic among curious thrill seekers and reporters. The hostages had no chance of escape because they were tied inside the helicopters.

  Finally, just before midnight, the armored carriers arrived and headed toward the helicopters and hostages. Seeing them, a terrorist machine-gunned the hostages in one helicopter. Another threw a grenade into the other. All the Israelis were killed. Issa was killed in the fighting that followed, but three terrorists were caught.

  To add to the debacle, TV reporters had found their way to the airfield’s locked outer gates. Before 11 p.m., someone with Olympic insignia—no one knows who—came to the fence and shouted, “All are saved!” That word went around the world. The German government spokesman repeated it. Newspapers printed it. Willi Daume brought the news jubilantly into the IOC council meeting.

  It was not until 2 a.m. or later that the German armed forces returned with the truth. “They are all gone,” said a stricken Jim McKay on ABC.

  It would be hard to think of a scenario more hideously illustrative of the compounding effects of government, official, and journalistic irresponsibility. Those of us in the US building went to our beds at 1 a.m., shaken but relieved that our fellow Olympians had survived—then awoke to newspapers showing a picture of a horribly burned helicopter and headlines that said “Sixteen dead.”

  “If they loaded us all into a plane right now to take us home,” said a devastated Prefontaine, “I’d go.” Instead, Bill Dellinger, who’d vaulted a fence to get into the Village, persuaded Pre to come away into the countryside. He drove with Prefontaine for a full hour, well into Austria, where they stopped and inhaled truly Alpine air. To keep Pre from running himself to death as therapy, Dellinger had them take a jog together. This was September 6. Assuming the Games went on with only a day’s postponement, the 5000 semifinals would now be on the 8th and the final on the 10th.

  “I knew I didn’t have to worry about Pre’s bouncing back emotionally,” Dellinger would say, “because he was so pissed that all this was giving Viren an extra day to recover after the 10,000.” Dellinger goaded him a little more, pointing out that since he was, at twenty-one, the youngest in the race by two years, every veteran in there—say, defending champ Gamoudi or Harald Norpoth—was going down the list of entrants, coming to his name and writing him off as a cocky kid who was going to be thrown back into babyhood by the attacks. Personalizing it like that was working, Dellinger saw.

  While Pre and Dellinger were in Austria, 80,000 attended the memorial service for the Israeli dead, held in the main stadium. Frank and I walked there from the Village. Russian soccer players were practicing on a field beside the stadium. Concession stands were open, smelling of sauerkraut. The athletes were given seats on the infield with no concern for nation. Frank, Jan Johnson, and I sat down amid Ethiopian runners and French vaulters. Bowerman, as was his habit, observed from high in the stands.

  The music was Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. The program seemed long-winded, not because it was boring (we were waiting for Brundage to say whether the Games would go on), but because it was in four languages, German, French, English, and Hebrew. The head of the Israeli team read out the names of the dead, all tough, combative men: wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, weight lifters Yossef Romano and David Berger, fencing coach Andrei Spitzer, track coach Amitzur Shapira, shooting coach Kehat Shorr, wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund, weight-lifting judge Jacov Springer, and wrestlers Zaev Friedman, Eliezer Halfin, and Mark Slavin.

  Organizing Committee head Willi Daume spoke, pallid and shaky. Then eighty-four-year-old Avery Brundage stood before the podium. He had only a few days left in his twenty-year reign as IOC president. “Every civilized nation mourns . . . ” he began, and noted that the Olympic movement had never suffered such an assault. But then he thundered, “The Games have been subjected to two savage attacks! We lost the Rhodesian battle against naked political blackmail!”

  I recall being blurry-eyed, staring down at the infield grass between my feet and wondering whether I’d heard right. Had Brundage actually just equated the murders of our fellow Olympians with his having to kick out that odious state?

  In the car on the way to the stadium, he had shown his speech to IOC Executive Director Monique Berlioux. Even she, who knew him well, was shocked. “It was awful,” she said later. “He’d almost ignored what had happened to the Israelis and written a political speech about the threatened boycott over Rhodesia. I said, ‘You cannot say that. It is a ceremony in memory of the murdered Israelis. This is impossible!’”

  Brundage had replied, “I know what I have to do.”

  And after he had done it, after he had seemed to confirm all accounts of his towering racism and anti-Semitism, Brundage boomed, “The Games must go on! All events will be held twenty-four hours after originally scheduled!” And the crowd cheered.

  Now, at decades’ long remove, Brundage’s defiant speech does not seem simply anti-Semiti
c. The man was a genuinely tragic character, his flaw and strength inextricable. He defined himself as the noble defender of the purity of the Games. Throwing out Smith and Carlos in 1968 was racist, but only incidentally so. Convinced he was defending the Games from political attack, he was blind to an act of conscience. In Munich, John Carlos himself cried out, “In 1968, we didn’t hurt anybody. We just expressed our feelings. Can Brundage see the difference?”

  No, he couldn’t. There was no difference for him between outside agitators killing Olympians, deluding them into black-gloved gestures, or pressuring his IOC to keep out a country he’d decided to let in. All were attacks, and he fought them all with equal fury.

  Walking back, Frank and I bumped into a pensive Bowerman. “If Avery is eighty-four,” Bill calculated, “and he’s been IOC president for twenty years, then he was sixty-four when he took over. I’m sixty-one. I can’t imagine living like that for two years and not being made a madman. Let him go. He’s done. He’s gone. Let’s hope the next guy, the Irish lord, Killanen, is halfway sane.”

  Back in our rooms we talked all this over. “The Games should go on,” said walker Tom Dooley, “and they will. But for the wrong reasons. The Germans don’t want any hitches in their organization. There are the financial considerations. Those people who applauded just want to see who will win the 5000 and the hell with the rest.”

  “What are the right reasons?” I asked.

  “Just one. To stay together. Who wins or loses now is ridiculously unimportant, considered against these men’s deaths. But we have to stay together.”

  Bowerman would never be more eloquent than in conveying that necessity. But he made no speeches. He called no big team meeting to address us on the subject of how to feel. He didn’t want to preach. What he wanted to do was be there, physically with us, in ones and twos. He moved from room to room, shared with athletes the latest word on rescheduling the remaining events, and asked if people were okay. If anyone wanted to talk, he came in, sat down, and listened. If they’d had the reaction that Pre and I had, that our competitive urges were being sapped by our grief, he’d offer a word of context.