Smith and Carlos took the medal stand on the second day of the games.
Smith won the 200-meter gold, setting a world record in the process, and Carlos earned the bronze. Silver-medalist Peter Norman of Australia, a white athlete, joined them in the protest. Smith said that he and Carlos informed Norman of their intentions so he wouldn't be embarrassed. In an interview thirty-nine years later, Norman commented, ''I told them, sure, that I certainly supported their cause, but as it turned out, it would have looked ridiculous if I had raised my fist, too. John asked if I'd wear a button that said, 'Olympic Project for Human Rights' and I did.''11 As the U.S. flag rose up the flagpole and The Star-Spangled Banner played, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and raised their fists in a black-power salute. Although it is rarely acknowledged, the two men also wore no shoes to protest black poverty and beads on their necks as a symbol against lynching. The crowd booed as they left the podium. At a press conference after the event, Smith explained, ''If I win, I am an American, not a black American. But if I did something bad then they would say 'a Negro.' We are black and we are proud of being black.''12 He also said, ''It is very discouraging to be in a team with white athletes. On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.''13
Only hours later, Brundage had stripped Smith and Carlos of their medals and kicked them out of Olympic village, saying, ''They violated one of the basic principles of the Olympic games: that politics play no part whatsoever in them.''14 Across the nation, others were critical of Smith and Carlos' actions.
The Los Angeles Times called it a ''Nazi-like salute.'' A Chicago sportswriter called the two men ''storm troopers.''15 Boxer George Foreman waved a miniature American flag after he won the gold, which many perceived as a rebuke of Smith and Carlos. Foreman claimed the flag had nothing to do with them, and that he always carried a flag to let people know he was American. Other athletes supported OPHR's movement. The crew team, all-white, issued a statement of support. And, despite the fact that women were virtually left out of the movement, the women's 4 x 100-meter relay team dedicated its gold medal to Smith and Carlos. Later in the games, Lee Evans, who helped found OPHR, set a world record in winning the 400 meters. On the stand, he wore a black beret. Smith and Carlos received death threats when they returned to the United States.
During his career, Smith set an amazing eleven world records, either as an individual or as part of a relay team. The 1968 Olympic record was not his first world record, nor his first civil rights protest. After Smith set his first world record in spring 1965, he joined one hundred other people in a civil rights protest walk from Sunnyvale to San Francisco, California.
After the Olympic games, Smith got a job at a car wash while he finished his degree at San Jose State. He also played in two games for the Cincinnati Bengals, and eventually earned a master's degree. Both Smith and Carlos went on to be high school track and field coaches. Smith also coached track and was assistant athletic director at Oberlin College in Ohio, then a coach and teacher at Santa Monica College in California. Smith wrote a book titled Silent Gesture. It chronicles his life, starting from growing up one of twelve children who worked in cotton and grape fields. Throughout the book, Smith discusses his confidence that the protest was the right thing to do, although he expresses deep regret that public reaction to the protest caused his mother's premature death and broke up his first marriage. He also disputes some of the most popular stories about the incident, saying that he still has his gold medal and that he was never a member of the Black Panthers, as was widely alleged.
In 2005 San Jose State granted Smith an honorary doctorate. He has publicly denounced those athletes caught using steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs, calling them ''an insult to the playing field in all sports.''16 Carlos continued to be active in civil rights and other forms of protest. He has spoken out publicly against the war in Iraq. In an interview thirty-seven years later, Carlos explained, ''It was the revolt of the Black man. Athletics was my occupation. I didn't do what I did as an occupation. I raised my voice in protest as a man.''17 Carlos explained that only the less fortunate praised them for their efforts when they returned from the games. Businessmen and black political caucuses, he said, never embraced him or Smith.
San Jose State unveiled a statue honoring Smith and Carlos in 2005. At the unveiling of the statue, which does not contain an image of him, Peter Norman commented, ''There is often a misunderstanding of what the raised fists signifled. It was about the civil rights movement, equality for man.… The issues are still there today and they'll be there in Beijing.''18
USSR VERSUS U.S. BASKETBALL-TRY, TRY AGAIN
The United States Olympic basketball program entered the 1972 Summer Olympics with a perfect record. From the introduction of basketball as an Olympic sport in 1936, the United States had not lost a single game. The United States selected its Olympic team from its top amateurs every four years and they played only a handful of exhibition games to prepare. Conversely, the Soviet Union put together a full-time team that played almost 400 games before the Olympics. Their meeting in the 1972 Olympic finale became one of the most famous games in Olympic history, noted for an outcome that remains in dispute.
The United States opened the Munich Olympic Games by easily handling its first seven opponents. Tragically, terrorists attacked the Israeli Olympic team and killed eleven of its team members, temporarily delaying the Games.
Once the Games resumed, the United States won its eighth game, a thirty point victory over Italy, to advance to the gold-medal game against the Soviet Union.
The Soviet team was stiffer competition than the United States had faced throughout the Games. The Soviets led for most of the game and had the Americans down by ten points with less than ten minutes to play. The United States, with strong play from guard Kevin Joyce, fought back. With ten seconds left, Doug Collins stole the ball and was fouled on his way to the basket.
With three seconds on the clock, Collins made both free throws to give the United States the lead for the first time at 50-49. The events that followed would go down in history as the most controversial in Olympic basketball.
After Collins made the second free throw, the Soviets put the ball in play, but the referees stopped the game with one second remaining. The Soviets argued they had called timeout between Collins's two free throws. The referees reset the clock to three seconds. To this day, there has never been consensus as to whether the timeout was legally called. The Soviets in-bounded the ball again, and the horn blew, apparently indicating the end of the game and an American victory. The referees ordered the teams back on the court, however, claiming the clock had not been properly restored to three seconds before the play. The third and final time the Soviets in-bounded the ball, Alexander Belov caught the full-court pass and made the winning shot as time expired.
The stunned Americans stood in disbelief. Forward Mike Bantom said, ''It was like they were going to let them do it until they got it right.''19 The United States filed a formal protest with the International Basketball Federation that day, but the five-member panel did not overrule the result.
The panel split down cold war lines, with three communist bloc members voting for the Soviets and the other two voting for the Americans. The United States basketball team refused to accept its silver medals, and to this day they lay unclaimed in a vault in Switzerland. Team captain Kenny Davis said, ''We felt like they just did something to us that was illegal and we didn't know any other way to protest than to say that you're not about to get us to show up to take that silver medal.''20 Doug Collins expressed his feelings about the controversial game: ''It was sort of like being on top of the Sears tower in Chicago celebrating and then being thrown off and falling 100 floors to the ground.''21
Kenny Davis has gone as far as placing a clause in his will that his wife and children ''can never, ever receive that medal from the '72 Olympic games.''22
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL COLLUSION CASES
In January 1986 Major League Baseball's Players Union announced that it would formally charge the owners of the teams with collusion because of the lack of competing offers to free agents during the winter. At that time, twenty-eight free agents had signed contracts; twenty-six of the players had signed with their previous teams because they did not receive a single offer from any other team in Major League Baseball. In September 1987 Tom Roberts, the arbitrator in the collusion case between the players and owners, found that ''baseball owners conspired to destroy free agency after the 1985 season'' in violation of the collective bargaining agreement.23
In total, the grievance involved sixty-three players, including notable players such as Kirk Gibson, Donnie Moore, Carlton Fisk, Phil Niekro, Joe Niekro, and Butch Wynegar-none of whom received a single offer from another ball club. Kansas City appeared to have an interest in Gibson. However, after the owners meeting in October and the general managers meeting in November 1985, the Royals dropped its interest in the All-Star outfielder.24 Gibson's agent claimed the collusion cost his client between $3.5 and $4 million. The Players Union brought a second collusion grievance against the owners for their actions during the 1986 off-season. George Nicolau was named as the arbitrator of Collusion Case II after the owners dismissed Roberts, who heard the first case. Testimony in Collusion Case II revealed agreements between owners, going back to 1983, to cap offers to free agent players. A third collusion case was filed against the owners for their actions during the 1987 off-season and the creation of an information bank that kept records of offers clubs made to free agents, allowing every ball club to see what others were offering free agents. Arbitrator Tom Roberts handed down the financial penalties of Collusion Case I, which amounted to $10.5 million. The owners were also found guilty of collusion in both Collusion Case II and Collusion Case III. In December 1990 the players and owners reached a settlement covering all three cases, totaling $280 million.
All told, over three hundred players were impacted by the three years of collusion between the owners. As a result of the settlement, each team was responsible for paying almost $11 million. In 1990 the average payroll for an MLB team was only $16.5 million, and three teams had payrolls that were less than $11 million.
Marvin Miller of the Players Association said, ''I think it may be the worst sport scandal in history, It's disgraceful … disgraceful and not enough has been said or written about it.''25 Miller believed the collusion by MLB owners was so far beyond the famous 1919 Black Sox scandal because that involved eight players and one series, while the collusion scandal was a methodical conspiracy among all owners, general managers, and the commissioner to steal money from over three hundred players over a three-year period.
ROY JONES JR. ROBBED OF GOLD MEDAL
For three rounds of boxing, American Roy Jones Jr. dominated Park Si-Hun, his South Korean opponent, in the gold medal bout in the 156-pound division at the 1988 Olympics in South Korea. Computerized analysis had Jones out-punching Park by an astounding 86-32 margin. Nearing the end of the second round, Park was given a standing eight count, the boxing version of a timeout, which allows a battered fighter to regain his composure. Every objective viewer of the fight knew that it was a clear and definitive victory for the American. All that remained was to raise his hand in victory.
Shockingly, it was Park's hand that was raised instead. Jones thought it was a mistake, saying, ''I thought they'd announced the wrong corner.''26 In spite of Jones's overwhelming dominance in the ring, the fight had indeed been awarded to the South Korean. Two judges, a Soviet and a Hungarian, had scored Jones as a decisive winner. Two others, from Uruguay and Morocco, scored it for Park. The fifth scored it a draw, but gave Park the nod for aggressiveness. The Moroccan judge, Hiduad Larbi, said that he voted for the Korean to appease the Korean fans, in spite of agreeing that Park was dominated in the fight. He said, ''The American won easily. So easily, in fact, that I was positive my four fellow judges would score the fight for the American by a wide margin. So I voted for the Korean to make the score only 4-1 for the American and not embarrass the host nation.''27
There were, however, other more sinister theories to explain the event. The U.S. coach, Ken Adams, suggested there was a payoff to the judges to vote for Park. He claimed that prior to the fight he had witnessed somebody who he described as ''a Korean'' showing some gold, wrapped in a rag, to two boxing officials, one of whom worked the Jones fight. Adams admitted that he did not see if the officials took the gold.
Regardless of whether money or gold changed hands to rig the outcome of the fight, international boxing has a history of dubious outcomes to fights and Adams knew this could be a factor prior to the Olympics. Sitting in the Olympic village days before the opening ceremonies, Adams had commented that the haul of gold medals for American boxers depended on several factors including ''if everybody gets a fair shake.''28 Sports reporters who covered boxing at the time heard whispers that the Korean would win if he could just stay standing through three rounds. Throughout the fight a fan screamed at Jones, ''Don't let it get to the judges! Don't let it get to the judges!'' Then, after the third round, the same fan was heard saying, ''You let him off the hook.''29
In spite of the egregious robbery of the gold medal from Jones, Park initially defended his title publicly, saying in a news conference that there ''was a little home-ring advantage,'' but he maintained that he won the bout and that his toughest fight had actually been against an Italian fighter.30 He would later, however, acknowledge that Jones was the rightful winner. While there certainly were Korean boxing fans who celebrated the result, there were other Koreans who were ashamed and embarrassed by it. In fact, fifty Korean monks journeyed to the Olympic village to apologize to Jones before he left the country.
Almost immediately after the fight, Olympic officials recognized Jones with an award for being the outstanding boxer of the Games.
Jones initially considered boycotting the medal ceremony. Even after accepting the silver medal, he questioned his own actions. ''I guess I was trying to show everybody that we [the United States] can win well, and we can lose well.''31
The three judges who handed Park the fight were suspended for two years by the International Amateur Boxing Association (IABA). The IABA president, Anwar Chowdry said, ''We have to punish these officials for contravening the regulations during the boxing tournament in Seoul.''32
The United States Amateur Boxing Federation (USABF) appealed the result of the fight based on the admission of the Moroccan judge that he did not score the fight properly. The appeal was dismissed for not coming within the thirty minutes allowed after the result was announced. The USABF representative pressed the issue, given that there was no time limit for incidents of fraud The executive committee voted 11-2, with fifteen abstentions, to reverse the decision, but the general-secretary, East German Karl-Heinz Weir, ruled that the decision would stand. Olympic boxing did, however, change the rules that govern scoring to include computerized scoring methods that force the scoring to be more transparent and to keep viewers apprised of the score as fights progress.
Roy Jones Jr. was welcomed home with a series of medal presentations from friends and family who created at least fifteen gold medals to bestow on the real champion. Coworkers of his father, Roy Jones Sr., gave him a medal inscribed, ''A Solid Gold Medal for a Solid Gold Champ.'' Jones went on to have an outstanding professional boxing career, amassing over fifty wins and holding titles in four divisions. He was voted the ''Fighter of the Decade'' in 1999 by the Boxing Writers Association of America.
Jones's name resurfaced in discussions of Olympic scandals in 2002 when, at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, South Korean short track skater Kim Dong-Sung was disqualifled for cutting off competitors, which effectively handed the gold medal to American hero Apolo Anton Ohno. Some believed that replays did not support that Kim's actions merited disqualification, and Korean skating fans claimed it was payback for the
debacle in the Jones fight. In the world of sports, as in many other institutions, paybacks are hell.
STEINBRENNER BANNED FROM BASEBALL
On July 30, 1990, Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent banned legendary New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner from further management of his team. The surprising decision resulted from a relationship Steinbrenner had with Howard Spira, a known gambler, in which the owner paid for negative information regarding one of his own players, Dave Winfield. Steinbrenner had been at the helm of the Yankees for over seventeen years and was the most recognized owner in the sport.
Through Steinbrenner's testimony and other evidence, Vincent determined the owner had violated Major League Baseball's Rule 21, dealing with conduct not in the best interest of the game. Further, Vincent said that the testimony revealed ''a pattern of behavior that borders on the bizarre.''33 The crux of Vincent's issue with Steinbrenner was that the owner had maintained the relationship with Spira, without alerting the commissioner, over a period extending for months, with the purpose of gaining information about Winfield through a private investigation. Winfield and Steinbrenner had been locked in an ongoing dispute, and Steinbrenner was likely seeking leverage through whatever means possible. Steinbrenner's relationship with Spira culminated with a payment of $40,000 to the known gambler. During the testimony, which produced 372 pages of transcripts, Steinbrenner offered a variety of reasons for the payment, ranging from charity to extortion, neither of which swayed Vincent. He was convinced that Steinbrenner intended the payoff to create distance between himself and Spira, whom Steinbrenner had no further use for and considered a potential source of embarrassment.
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