Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  And then there was this one persistent reminder, this nagging substrate, that this wasn’t the best of all worlds, that the ugly taint of nationalism involving a country that had committed a terrible crime would hang over the entire competition. You’d be in the boxing or basketball arena or at the swimming pool. And all of a sudden, someone, perhaps a fan, more like a government plant, would stand up and launch a cheer for the host nation, and others would join in. I’m not sure I have it exactly right; it would start off something like an old college football yell of the 1920s, “Alla-vee, alla-vay!” And it would end, “Mexico, Mexico, Yay! Yay! Yay!” Over and over again. I was frankly sick of it, sick of that pistol government and its phony nationalism and government thugs. And then came the incident with the black glove salute.

  It had been building up for almost a year. In 1967, under the leadership of Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at San Jose State, a Black Athletes Boycott Committee, later changed to Olympic Project for Human Rights, was formed. The purpose was to organize a boycott of the ’68 Olympics unless certain demands were met, including Brundage’s resignation, the appointment of one black member to the American Olympic Committee, a restoration of Muhammad Ali’s championship, etc. Proposed Olympic boycotts had enjoyed some recent success. In May of ’67, Brundage had gotten the IOC to readmit South Africa, which had been expelled in ’64 because of its apartheid policy. Thirty-two African nations threatened to boycott the games. The number eventually grew to 40, and the IOC backed down. Brundage was tougher against the Edwards group, though.

  “If the American Negroes boycott the Olympics, they won’t be missed,” he said. The boycott died from lack of support by the athletes themselves, but something clearly was in the works. It broke, of course, when San Jose State teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos won the gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200 meters and staged their symbolic demonstration on the victory stand. Eyes turned downward, one black gloved fist raised, the right for Smith, left for Carlos, shoeless but wearing long black socks, the Olympic Project for Human Rights medallion on their chests, they presented an imposing picture during the abbreviated version of the national anthem that’s traditionally played at the games.

  It has become an event frozen in time. People who weren’t there have spoken about it intimately. Many others claimed to be present, as they had for other landmark events such as Dwight Clark’s catch against the Cowboys in the NFC championship or the Lou Gehrig farewell in Yankee Stadium, or Bill Bradley’s 42 against Michigan in the Holiday Festival Tournament in the Garden. I’ve read dozens of versions of how writers were personally affected by the brief Smith and Carlos tableau … I guess “chilling” was the most common descriptive although you’d find a “disgraceful” here and there, not as often as Harry Edwards would have you believe, but it was an adjective leaned on by the right wingers among us. I also saw one or two “inspirings.”

  I am looking back through my set of clips on the incident. What did I call it? I didn’t call it anything. I speculated that Smith’s gloved right hand and Carlos’ gloved left hand probably meant that they had only one pair of gloves between them. Was I chilled? Outraged? Honestly, no. I felt that I had seen a puzzle solved. I knew something would happen, I just didn’t know where or when. Then it happened and it was up to me to cover it and try to present it as clearly as I could from as many angles as possible, and then, when some air had been put under it, I could sort it out and provide an overview.

  I even found my old notebook. There was a smattering of boos as Smith and Carlos walked off the stand. They looked grim, but Australia’s Peter Norman, the silver medalist who had specifically requested — and worn — the Olympic Project button in support, looked pretty happy, probably remembering the way he got it.

  “I asked for one,” he said later. “Before we went to the stand, Smith asked someone he knew in the crowd for his button. The guy refused. Then Carlos took over. He said, ‘Hand that thing over.’ And that’s how I got my button.”

  I filed three first-day pieces, at least that many follow-up stories, plus a column. I remember it was a nonstop hustle for quotes. I was covering the games by myself. You had to keep moving. I did a feature on Norman, a fascinating character who taught school in Melbourne during the week and worked for the Salvation Army on weekends and would even race, wearing a Salvation Army shirt. I covered the post-event press conferences. Carlos was rambunctious … I had known him when he used to compete as a New York high schooler in the meets at the 168th St. Armory.

  “Now you’ve done it,” I said when I had a moment alone with him.

  “Man, don’t I know it?” he said. “But you know … it feels good.”

  Smith was quiet and deliberate. “The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity,” he said, slowly, so that the journalists, especially the foreign ones, would get it right. I talked to both their wives. “Does the American Negro … ?” a European writer began, but they quickly corrected him. “Black! Black!” they said, one-two, quick-march. That was way before the term “African American” joined the vocabulary.

  There was breaking news to report, a response from the American Olympic Committee to find out about, from the track team, the IOC … but not Brundage. The black athletes had requested that he not be on hand to give them their medals, and he had retired from the fray. How about other demonstrations? A few runners, including 400-meter man Lee Evans, another San Jose Stater, had worn the long black socks, “pimp socks,” they used to call them in some neighborhoods in New York. The black socks, unaccompanied by shoes, Smith had explained, represented the poverty of the black people. Would black socks worn by others be considered a protest? And if so, what was the official position? And how about the black berets? The 400-meter men were rumored to be considering wearing them on the stand during the playing of the anthem. Would this be bad enough to get them … get them what? (Actually they did wear berets, but since it was raining at the time, it went down as a standoff.) I know it sounds silly, looking back at all this, but at the time it was rush, rush, get your stuff filed, think about it later.

  I know I had to get into the Olympic Village as soon as possible. If there was to be any action, it would start there. I had a car. The village had two gates, each one manned by a couple of security guys. I had made a goofy pass, consisting of various TV logos pasted in a montage on a piece of 8 x 11 poster board. I would put it on the dashboard, with my press credential and driver’s license attached to it, mumble “Televisa Europa,” to the guards and keep moving. There was no up and down security arm. That was the key: to keep moving while they were scratching their heads. One time Brent Musburger, who now does the college football for ABC but was a Chicago newspaperman in those days, was in the car with me. He nearly blew it for me because he was laughing so hard. To this day, whenever he sees me, he’ll greet me with, “Televisa Europa.”

  It was in the village that the word came down that Smith and Carlos had been banished from the team and the country and given 48 hours to clear out. I had gotten some early quotes from U.S. Olympic Committee president Doug Roby about how he had issued an apology to the Olympic organizers, and he hoped that would cover it. Or maybe he was expecting the demonstrators to issue some apology; it wasn’t certain. But 12 hours later, Brundage or, it was rumored, an official from the State Department, had gotten to Roby and firmed him up at the punishment level. I had been there when Smith and Carlos first came back to their dorm. They passed two coaches along the way.

  Hilmer Lodge, the Chairman of the Track and Field Committee … good natured, fatherly, for many years a much beloved figure in West Coast circles … went with his basic instinct.

  “Hey, Tommie, great race,” he said. Smith had suffered a groin strain in the semis and had gutted it out in the final, setting a world record.

  Stanford coach Payton Jordan, the American Olympic head coach, turned his head away abruptly as they passed. A day
later, as word leaked out that Smith and Carlos had been expelled, the village was opened to reporters, and the American compound came alive. Any black athlete was immediately surrounded, actually anyone wearing a U.S. sweat suit. On the steps of the American dorm sat a big, smiling kid waving a tiny American flag. George Foreman, 19, soon to be Olympic heavyweight boxing champion. Your opinion, please.

  “Don’t have one,” he said. “I’m just having a good time here.”

  I have scattered notes on events that happened so fast that I didn’t have time to date them … Carlos heckles a Roby press conference from his eighth-floor dorm window … hangs a sign, “Brundage Must Go”… two more signs from athletes’ dorms, “Wallace for President” and “Win in Vietnam”… Carlos and wife exit the village … Parisian newsman sticks his head in the window of his car. “We’re weez you, Carlos,” he says.

  The overview piece I wrote when it was all wrapped up was that the USOC and whoever got to it could have handled it with intelligence instead of the heavy boot. A protest? Well, OK, isn’t America supposed to be all about the spirit of protest? How about a nice dignified statement, “We certainly don’t agree with what they did, but here in America we recognize a person’s right to protest?” But this was Roby’s official position, prompted by the mounting criticism of athletes and officials from more than 100 nations, and expressed in a single mimeographed page:

  “We recognize that these incidents may be the result of granting athletes what might be considered excessive freedom in the cause of human rights, freedom granted by some of our coaches and managers during the four weeks in training before coming to Mexico.”

  Short and blocky, bull-necked with a head that looked like a concrete block and contained about as much brains, that was Roby. I wrote in my notebook at the time, “Where do they find these guys?”

  I talked to Edwards about it some years later. He said he celebrated when he read Roby’s statement. “It isn’t often that your enemy presents himself so clearly,” he said.

  Press reaction to the incident never really has been accurately presented, I believe. The athletes themselves, even one as reflective as Smith, described how they had been vilified by the press. Not entirely true. Sure, the conservatives took them on and waved the flag, but overall, Roby and Brundage got just as much, if not more, heat by the way they had handled the whole thing. And European newsmen, especially the British, were almost overwhelmingly in Smith and Carlos’ corner.

  Somehow it rubbed me wrong, though, when a young British writer showed me a think piece he had written about America and its miserable black-white relations, going back to slave days, based on this incident. Of course it was and still is a legitimate concern, but it was also an easy angle at the time to neglect any progress that had been made and paint, with a very heavy British brush, the primitive state Americans found themselves in. And besides, wasn’t England’s whole history of involvement in the slave trade about as bleak as ours? As I said, it was just a personal thing, an annoyance. Maybe the piece deserved to be written, I felt, but not by you, Jack.

  Edwards, who got his PhD and became Dr. Harry Edwards shortly thereafter and whom I’ve dealt with for many years since then (he became the 49ers’ consultant and liaison man for black players), was a different story. When I read his quotes about the hostile press, I got on the phone immediately.

  I reminded him about the story I had worked on with him about the boycott of the track meet sponsored by the restricted New York AC in the Garden earlier that year, 1968. I reminded him of all the sessions I had covered in Harlem, all the press conferences in storefront offices, H. Rap Brown, who was later convicted of shooting two police officers, standing up there telling us that he’d “blow up the Garden” if he had to. I reminded him of how the New York press covered all that, tongue in cheek about Brown’s statement … I mean, he didn’t get the name, Rap, for nothing … and how the treatment of the prospective boycott, which proved successful, was generally evenhanded and fair. Was this part of the press he had singled out as being ready to vilify Smith and Carlos?

  I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it couldn’t have been too bad because we have remained cordial. Through the years it’s just that I’m so tired of seeing the press demonized for propaganda purposes. But that’s another story.

  Munich 1972

  Munich was about the murder of 11 athletes and coaches. Everything else was a subplot. But it was a subplot with substance, with bitterness and mind-numbing inefficiency and pettiness by an American team that became the world’s laughingstock, a grotesque counterpoint to the tragedy of death. It was about indifference to human misery, from the athletes to the very top of Olympic officialdom, on a scale that I wouldn’t have thought possible if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

  And that’s what finally did it for me, what finally drove me out of this miserable arena three days before the competition officially ended. I’m sure you could find contributing factors — too many days of non-stop crises that broke some of the best and toughest reporters, too many nights of one and two hours sleep, taking a rifle butt to the head by a line of German security guards, watching a fellow reporter thrown down a flight of stairs when he tried to do his job, yes, by that same set of pseudo-policemen that botched the attempt to rescue the doomed athletes. I wasn’t tough enough, you say? Maybe you’re right, but you see it just came down to the fact that I didn’t care anymore how high they jumped or how fast they ran. I wrote about the awfulness of human behavior that I watched, from a very close vantage point — too close, maybe — and then I came home.

  The first crisis was taking place before I even got to Munich. The African nations and individual black athletes wanted Rhodesia kicked out for discriminatory policies. They were urging white American Olympians not to compete if Rhodesia was still in.

  “Yeah, Lee Evans talked to me about it,” said Milt Sonsky, an American javelin thrower who happened to be Jewish. “I told him, ‘I can see it now. I can see myself trying to get you guys to boycott the Olympics because Russia doesn’t let Jews leave the country.’ You know what they’d tell me to do?”

  Rhodesia was kicked out at the last moment over the strong objections of International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, who had yet to recognize that any kind of discrimination ever had existed in an athletic nation, be it Germany under Hitler or South Africa under apartheid. But Sonsky had touched on something deeper on the American team, torn into factions by its strange, moody coach, Bill Bowerman of the University of Oregon. He had organized a set of practice meets the week before the competition started, a procedure no one liked. He had conned Vince Matthews, a 400-meter man, into believing that if Evans beat him in one of those competitions he could take away his place on the team, even though Bowerman knew it was impossible. The entries already had been announced. The team was a seething mass of hatred and petty jealousies spurred on by the coach.

  “The way it is here,” Sonsky said, “the weight men stay with the weight men, the conservative guys with the conservatives, the blacks with the blacks. I’ve never even been introduced to Jim Ryun. I don’t think he even knows who I am.”

  The Rhodesia situation was just calming down when crisis No. 2 broke. American sprinters Reynaud Robinson and Eddie Hart, each of whom had won his heat in the opening round of the 100 meters, missed the start of the second round five hours later. Blew it. Missed it cold. The word from the track and field staff was a noise like an oyster. Larry Merchant, our lead columnist on the New York Post, and I got our asses over to the American dorm in a hurry. The athletes we talked to were in a state of shock, as puzzled as we were.

  “Could you see this happening on the Russian team?” said George Frenn, the weight thrower.

  “They’d have somebody out back with a pistol to his head.”

  On a bulletin board downstairs, we got our answer. The schedule that was posted was a year and a half old, a prel
iminary listing at best. But it never had been updated. Exact times for the start of each event were vague. Some of them, including the heats of the 100, had been changed. Bowerman’s staff hadn’t even seen fit to get them corrected.

  We were on the second floor when the police arrived. They wore the powder blue blazers, the color deliberately selected to denote friendliness and softness, the epitome of “The New Germany, heralding what will be known as The Carefree Games,” the PR brochure had said. They were led by an American in a business suit, powder blue, of course, in keeping with the motif. I had seen this guy before. Fairly young, thin, soft-spoken in a kind of a sneaky, lisping way. I couldn’t quite figure him out. An intelligence operative of some sort? Didn’t really seem the type, but who knew? He did serve as a kind of half-assed commandant of the security group. All I knew was that he gave me the creeps.

  “Out of here,” he said. “Out.”

  “Look, we’re trying to do our …” Larry said, but he never got the “job” part out. One of the powder blue security guys had him by the armpits and in one yank heaved him down the flight of wooden stairs. Larry, who now announces the televised fights for HBO, stands about 5-6. He literally flew, bounced a couple of times, and came to rest at the bottom of the staircase. By this time I had my glasses and watch off, my fake front tooth, on what’s called a “flipper,” out and in my pocket.