Brougham, like everyone else who saw Owens run in Berlin and who later watched him in Riefenstahl’s elegy to his greatness, was most impressed by the graceful, effortless, perfectly coordinated rhythm of his running. “The picture runner,” he called Owens.
“Jesse,” Brougham now asked, probing unsuccessfully for something more than Owens’s steady diet of clichés, “do you think it’s possible that you ran too hard today? Maybe you should have saved all that speed.”
“I don’t think I overexerted myself,” Owens countered, running the towel through his hair. “I am used to running four times a day, so tomorrow I hope to be rested. I’m going home to lay around now, eat early and then go to bed. This is a great show. I never saw such a wonderful crowd. The track is good and fast and I’ll shoot the works in the final tomorrow.”
In the final, he said. Assuming that Brougham reported Owens’s words accurately, it is worth noting that he did not mention the semifinals. Why would he have? It was clearer now than ever before that no one could keep pace with him.
As the shadows at the stadium grew longer, Cornelius Johnson was, as expected, dominating the high-jump competition. Although he and Albritton shared the world record, Johnson was considered the stronger competitor. (Budd Schulberg, the novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter, described Johnson, his classmate at Los Angeles High School, as “a funny-looking kid with a boyishly grave face.”) As confident as any athlete of his time, Johnson did not bother to remove his sweat suit until the bar had been placed at 2.00 meters (6 feet, 6¾ inches), a height that only he was able to clear. Albritton, for his part, was not at his best. At about seven P.M., with every other event on the first day’s schedule concluded, Johnson won the gold medal at 2.03 meters (6 feet, 8 inches). Albritton was in a fierce struggle for the silver medal with Thurber, one of Cromwell’s Trojans, and Kalevi Kotkas, of Finland. To determine the silver and bronze medalists, there was a three-way jump-off. Albritton prevailed, and Thurber took the bronze.
Soon three American flags were being hoisted high above the field, and three times “The Star-Spangled Banner” rang out. But unlike Woellke, Fleischer, and the three Finns, the American high jumpers were denied the honor of a congratulatory audience with Hitler. Even before they mounted the medal stand, the Chancellor had left the stadium—to the rapturous delight of the crowd waiting outside. By ignoring Johnson and Albritton, Hitler gave the unmistakable impression that he was both displeased that black men had triumphed at his games and that he would personally have nothing to do with black Olympians—even as he also chose not to congratulate Thurber, who was white. The vast majority of the writers present reported that Hitler had, at the very least, snubbed Johnson—it was unclear in most minds whether Albritton, as a silver medalist, deserved to be congratulated—and criticized the Führer for having done so.
“It isn’t for your correspondent to question the movements of the German leader,” Jesse Abramson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “but the fact remains that his abrupt departure after reviewing virtually the entire afternoon program caused the wagging of many tongues.” In the New York Times, Arthur Daley wrote, “Five minutes before the United States jumpers moved in for the ceremony of the Olympic triumph, Hitler left his box. Press box interpreters of this step chose to put two and two together and arrive at the figure four. In this they may be correct.”
But Paul Gallico arrived at a different figure. He was inclined, again, to give the Germans the benefit of the doubt. Referring to Johnson and Albritton, he wrote, “They just missed being presented to Der Führer by a matter of 10 minutes. He had received all the other victors, but the American boys [Albritton and Thurber] took too long at their jump-off and the boss went home to supper. Some of the correspondents saw a political plot in this but deponent is inclined to think Adolf merely got hungry, an old German custom.”
Al Laney of the Herald Tribune was also unconvinced that Hitler had deliberately insulted Johnson and Albritton. “Since Hitler had been in the stadium nearly four hours at this time and the day’s program was practically over and since the Americans did not come forward for the victory ceremony until after 7 o’clock,” Laney wrote, “it is unlikely that the disposition to make an incident of the development was justified, although the fact remains that the Americans alone were not received.”
A Nazi spokesman denied that Hitler had left his box to avoid congratulating the black athletes. He said that the Führer had to beat the traffic streaming from the Olympic stadium. Even now, no one can say with certainty why Hitler chose not to wait another ten minutes to congratulate Johnson and Albritton. It could have been entirely inadvertent, but it probably was not. Even assuming that the snub was unintended, the question still lingers: Why did it happen? Was it because Hitler thought it would look bad for him to be seen with blacks? Was it because he was genuinely disappointed that blacks had won? Or was it because he was disgusted by the thought of pressing black flesh?
Whatever Hitler’s reasons, De Baillet-Latour was furious. His worst fear had been realized. On the first day of the games, a political scandal had erupted. To his credit, he stood up to the Chancellor and demanded that he no longer congratulate any of the medalists unless he planned to congratulate them all. The man who just a few months earlier had boldly marched his troops into the Rhineland, who in two years would annex Austria and force the Czechs to hand over the Sudetenland, who in three years would launch a war that lasted six years and cost tens of millions of lives, meekly acceded to the count’s demand. With goodwill the order of the day, Hitler would not allow himself to be called a poor sport. From that day on, he agreed, no athletes would be summoned to his box.
Whether or not Hitler cared to acknowledge them, the achievements of Johnson, Albritton, and Owens on the first day of the games enabled the amateur eugenicists and anthropologists to start spewing their theories again. With Johnson and Albritton winning medals and Owens establishing a world record, much was immediately written about the unique qualities of the black American athletes. But at least Bill Corum of the New York Journal declined to subscribe to the nonsense. “Several scientific or semi-scientific magazine articles have appeared recently explaining the rise of the Negro athlete in the past four or five years,” Corum wrote in the hours following Owens’s Olympic debut. “But it is doubtful if much mystery attaches to it. For the first time these colored boys have had the advantage of equal opportunity and good coaching.” Less progressively, he continued, “They were born with natural grace and rhythm, and there’s nothing much more important in athletics than rhythm. It also has been written of them that they are closer to the primitive than their white rivals, and, therefore, more rugged. I doubt that part. You don’t see them winning any distance races, do you?”
For his part, Jesse Owens was not inclined to pay any attention to the eugenicists. Their theories were all too familiar to him. He was also profoundly uninterested in the snub controversy. By the time Johnson and Albritton had won their medals, he was back at the Olympic village, eating and relaxing to the strains of Frank Wykoff’s records. Hitler’s failure to congratulate the black high jumpers eventually became the foundation of the story that Owens spent much of his life recounting, but in the hours after it happened, he was fully focused on the races that would take place the following day—the races that would make him an Olympic champion.
Before he went to bed, though, he turned to Albritton. “You know, Dave, there’s nothing wrong with a silver medal,” he said, sympathetically but slightly unconvincingly.
“Jesse, I’m fine with it,” Albritton said, more convincingly. “But what do you know about second place?”
16
Day Two
* * *
BERLIN: MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 1936
MILLIONS OF American newspaper readers had woken up on August 2 to find in their local newspapers a column by Henry McLemore, who was sometimes called “Stopwatch.” In his inimitable style, he handicapped the Olympic races as if they were
horseraces. For instance, in the 800 meters, McLemore liked John Woodruff, of the University of Pittsburgh: “Big, black, awkward yearling, whose long striding legs will churn cinders in his backwash.” Fortunately, McLemore’s reverse anthropomorphism did not apply solely to black runners. He called Glenn Hardin, his pick in the 400-meter hurdles, “the best-looking colt at the meeting.” In the flat 400 meters, McLemore picked Archie Williams, also a black American, to win and England’s Arthur Brown to place: “[Brown] wears blinkers and [is] a tremendous stretch runner.” At 1,500 meters, he put his money on Italy’s Luigi Beccali: “Much improved over 1932 form when he won in a canter.” And so on.
Predictably, McLemore’s surest bet was Jesse Owens—but at 200 meters, not 100. Yes, he picked Owens to win the 100—like almost everyone else—but he observed correctly that the 200 was the cinch. “His best distance,” McLemore wrote, “and others appear in it only for the ride.” His best parlay for the meet was Owens to win the 100 and the 200 meters.
There was nothing unique about McLemore’s views. Ever since Randall’s Island and the demise of Peacock as a rival, the press had characterized Owens not as an Olympic gold medal hopeful but as the inevitable triple champion of the sprints and the broad jump. It was the kind of pressure that might make any competitor nervous; the public had been made to think that anything less than three gold medals would be akin to failure. These were also the kind of plaudits that might make any competitor overconfident; Owens had been described as the swiftest, most graceful, most gifted runner since early man first broke into a trot.
But Owens never lost focus or allowed himself to get tangled in the expectations of the writers. By all accounts, he slept and ate well at the Olympic village. He socialized with his teammates and with foreign athletes. He trained under Snyder’s gaze but never strained. He didn’t even worry about his new shoes. “Larry, they’re just shoes,” he said, as if he were preparing for a meet against Northwestern or Illinois.
Snyder, in contrast, was nervous—and suspicious. The USC gang made him anxious, especially after the failed power play on the Manhattan. It was embarrassing to him that Dean Cromwell was an official U.S. coach while he was merely a personal coach. But what really bothered him was the chumminess between Cromwell and his sprinting protégés, Frank Wykoff and Foy Draper. Snyder knew his disdain for the runners was irrational, based purely on their association with Cromwell. But together Cromwell, Wykoff, and Draper embodied, in his eyes, the enemy—USC and its system. He knew, or thought he knew, what Cromwell thought of him, what he thought of a man who had made his reputation on the talents of Jesse Owens and David Albritton, who were conspicuously darker-hued than Trojan Olympians. Every time Cromwell condescended to him, he detected the unspoken sentiment: Anybody can win with coloreds; you’re not playing by the rules.
It was no secret that Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, David Albritton, Cornelius Johnson, Archie Williams, John Woodruff, Fritz Pollard, Jr., and Mack Robinson would not have been welcome en masse on Cromwell’s team at USC. Of course, they would not have been welcome on most campuses. But most campuses were not the home of track and field’s most powerful team—and Dean Cromwell was no progressive. To Snyder, Cromwell and Lawson Robertson represented the old guard and all its foibles. Their schools were both private and rich, nothing like Ohio State. But what bothered Snyder most was the way Robertson and Cromwell treated, or rather, seemed to view, Jesse Owens. There was nothing overt. No slurs. No mistreatment. It was tone. It was a look. It was a sense Snyder perceived that in their eyes Owens’s genius was diminished by his blackness.
Snyder was certain that Owens detected it too, but Owens was accustomed to that particular attitude and inured to it. His lifelong refusal to allow bigots to truly bother him was often considered, unfairly, a token of his weakness. Even at the age of twenty-two, Owens knew who he was and what he was, and he could see no good reason to allow himself to become embittered by the ignorance of lesser men.
But Snyder was not inured to the double standard, and he allowed himself to feel the anger Owens refused to feel. Now, in Berlin, he thought that he had to protect Owens, not only against Robertson and Cromwell but against Hitler too. He knew that the most powerful people in the stadium wanted to see Owens fail, even as they understood that that was all but impossible. Still, Snyder felt that he had to be vigilant, as if in an instant the Nazis, or Brundage, or Cromwell, or Robertson, might sabotage Owens’s Olympic hopes—and his own.
It was only the second day of the games, but already the storylines were developing. They were all about race. America wasn’t winning all those medals; its blacks were. This was a fact, but it was also a position. “The American Olympic Committee is still looking for a white man who can even look something like an Olympic athlete,” Grantland Rice informed his millions of readers in a column dated August 3. “It may have to call on Scotland Yard or the German Secret Service. The United States would be below Haiti or China without the darktown parade.”
Looking at the bigger picture, Westbrook Pegler was typically incisive. “As events have turned out,” he wrote,
it would have been a great mistake for the Americans to withdraw from the Berlin Olympic Games, for they have had the luck to figure in certain incidents which have redounded to the honor of democracy and the shame of the dictatorial concept of sport . . . The American team will win, thanks to the Negro athletes, whose presence on the squad is proof of the democracy of sports in this country and the result necessarily will discredit dictatorial sportsmanship according to the values established by Adolf Hitler and Mussolini.
Against this backdrop of racial and world politics, Jesse Owens received word that the record he had set the previous day at 100 meters had been disallowed. Officials had determined that the tailwind was above the legal limit. Not a big deal, he said to himself as he loosened up at the Olympic stadium. It was disappointing, yes, especially because the conditions on Sunday had been perfect, and now a morning rain had slowed the red clay of the Olympic track, making record setting unlikely. Unlike Owens, though, the papers, especially the Daily Worker and the Atlanta World, a black daily, made an issue of the decision, accusing the track officials of bigotry. As usual, Owens chose not to allow himself to get caught up in the carping. He could not afford to. He needed to concentrate all his energies on the events to come.
There were two semifinal heats, beginning at 3:30, and Owens would race in the first against Swedish, Swiss, Dutch, and British runners—and Wykoff. He drew the sixth and outside lane. Wykoff was in the third lane. Franz Miller, the starter, had already endeared himself to Owens with his crisp instructions. Now Miller said, “Auf die platze”—on your marks. Then, “Fertig”—ready. Then he fired his pistol, and a small puff of white smoke curled into the air. On this day, there was nothing tentative about Owens’s start. He anticipated Miller’s command perfectly. In white shorts and a sleeveless shirt pinned with his competitor’s bib, number 733, all darkened by mud, he hurtled down the track, slowed only by the slippery turf. He overtook Wykoff at the 80-meter mark and finished in 10.4 seconds, one tenth of a second ahead of Wykoff and Lennart Strandberg, the Swede, who also both qualified for the final.
As Owens tried to stay warm in the thick, wet air, he watched the second semifinal. Metcalfe won, in 10.5 seconds, followed by Martin Osendarp of Holland and Erich Borchmeyer, the German Owens had met in 1932.
In less than ninety minutes, at five o’clock, the six qualifiers would meet in the final, perhaps the most glamorous event of the Olympics. For Owens, this would be the first true test of the games. If for some reason he later failed to win the broad jump and the 200 meters, winning the 100 meters would still assure him a place in the Olympic pantheon. Along with the marathon and the 1500 meters, the 100 meters has always been a signature event in the Olympic track-and-field program.
In the training room under the stands, Snyder made Owens lie down on a cot that he had commandeered from a first aid station. With Metcalfe lying a few
feet away on the only other cot—borrowed, as it were, from the Spanish delegation, which had returned home when the first shots of civil war were fired—Snyder offered Owens his version of a pep talk.
“Jesse,” he said, clasping his straw boater in his right hand, “I want you to focus on your start. You’ve been doing great, but you have to keep it up. Ralph’s running too fast. You can’t afford not to be off at the gun. You can’t be thinking of anything else. Not the shoes. Not the crowd. Not the girls in the stands. Focus on the gun.”
“Coach,” Owens said, an impish grin widening across his face, “don’t worry. I feel good, as good as I’ve ever felt.”
It was true. He had never felt as good. This was not going to be like Ann Arbor—not physically, anyway. For better or worse, he would not be able to channel pain into concentration. His back was fine. He was not distracted. Running on the track back at the athletes’ village, he had felt almost weightless, as if gravity were no longer exercising its grasp on his arms and legs and torso. He had achieved a rare state of athletic grace. Spooky, he thought, how effortlessly he had churned down the track and into the air at the broad-jump pit. It seemed to him that he felt like one of Charles Riley’s thoroughbreds. Strong. Focused. High-strung, perhaps, but only deep inside, only in a way that would make him go even faster.
Finally it was time to head back to the field. Among the crowds freely milling around the infield was the newest member of the international press corps: Eleanor Holm Jarrett. The International News Service had, upon her fall from grace, hired her as an Olympics columnist, although Paul Gallico and a few other friends were writing all her copy. Like most men, Owens was highly susceptible to her charms, and even as he was preparing for the most important event of his life, he entertained her innocuous questions. Responding to one, he said, “If I get pressed at all, Eleanor, I’ll bust that world record all right.”
Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics Page 19
