ALSO BY DAVID MARANISS
Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero
They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace,
Vietnam and America, October 1967
When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi
First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton
The Clinton Enigma
The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate
(with Ellen Nakashima)
“Tell Newt to Shut Up!” (with Michael Weisskopf)
SIMON & SCHUSTER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2008 by David Maraniss
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maraniss, David.
Rome 1960: the Olympics that changed the world / David Maraniss. —1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
1. Olympic Games (17th: 1960: Rome, Italy) 2. Olympics—Political aspects. 3. Olympics—Social aspects. 4. Cold War. I. Title.
GV7221960 .M37 2008
796.48—dc22 2008013013
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0267-1
ISBN-10: 1-4391-0267-8
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
To Linda, my quirky saint
CONTENTS
A BRIEF PREFACE
1 All the Way to Moscow
2 All Roads to Rome
3 No Monarch Ever Held Sway
4 May the Best Man Win
5 Out of the Shadows
6 Heat
7 Quicker Than the Eye
8 Upside Down
9 Track & Field News
10 Black Thursday
Interlude: Descending with Gratitude
11 The Wind at Her Back
12 Liberation
13 The Russians Are Coming
14 The Greatest
15 The Last Laps
16 New Worlds
17 The Soft Life
18 “Successful Completion of the Job”
19 A Thousand Sentinels
20 “The World Is Stirring”
APPENDIX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SOURCES
NOTES
A BRIEF PREFACE
THIS book is shaped around eighteen days in the summer of 1960 when the Olympics came to Rome. In the history of the modern Games, other times and places have drawn more notice, but none offers a deeper palate of character, drama, and meaning. The contests in Rome shimmered with performances that remain among the most golden in athletic history, from Wilma Rudolph in the sprints to Abebe Bikila in the marathon; from Cassius Clay in the boxing ring to Rafer Johnson in the decathlon. But beyond that the forces of change were everywhere. In sports, culture, and politics—interwoven in so many ways—one could see an old order dying and a new one being born. With all its promise and trouble, the world as we see it today was coming into view.
Television, money, and drugs were bursting onto the scene, altering everything they touched. Old-boy notions of pristine amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were crumbling in Rome and could never be taken as seriously again. Rome brought the first commercially broadcast Summer Games, the first doping scandal, the first runner paid for wearing a certain brand of track shoes. New nations and constituencies were being heard from, with increasing pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women as they emerged from generations of discrimination and condescension.
The singular essence of the Olympic Games is that the world takes the same stage at the same time, performing a passion play of nations, races, ideologies, talents, styles, and aspirations that no other venue, not even the United Nations, can match. The 1960 Games came during a notably anxious period in cold war history; almost every action in Rome was viewed through the political lens of those tense times.
One week before the Opening Ceremony, a Moscow trial brought the conviction of an American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, on espionage charges after his high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Soviet territory. Two days before the Closing Ceremony, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev set sail for New York for a dramatic appearance at the U.N. General Assembly, where he pounded his fist and railed against America and the West. In between, even as athletes from East and West Germany competed as a unified team in Rome, officials in East Berlin closed their border temporarily, laying the first metaphorical bricks for what months later would become the all-too-real Berlin Wall.
The pressures of the cold war played an underappreciated role in forcing change in culture and sports, all much in evidence in Rome. At the opening Parade of Nations at the Stadio Olimpico, the crowd was stirred by the sight of Rafer Johnson marching into the arena at the head of the U.S. delegation, the first black athlete to carry the American flag. Johnson’s historic act reflected his un-surpassed status as a world-class decathlete, but it also served as a symbolic weapon at a time when the United States was promoting freedom abroad but struggling to answer blatant racism at home, where millions of Americans were denied freedom because of the color of their skin. One of the new battlegrounds in the cold war was black Africa, where fourteen nations came into being that year. The ambitions of a postcolonial world were played out at the Olympics when marathoner Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia became the first athlete from sub-Saharan Africa to win a gold medal, running barefoot through the Roman streets less than a quarter century after Italy had invaded his homeland.
Early formulations of the individualism that came to define the sixties could also be seen in Rome, most notably in a cocky German sprinter, Armin Hary, and an eighteen-year-old light-heavyweight boxer from Louisville named Cassius Marcellus Clay, whose gold medal performance marked the first step onto the world stage of a character soon to gain renown as Muhammad Ali. And finally, it was at the 1960 Olympics that American women athletes took a more prominent role. Sexism still dominated the Olympic Movement, as it did the entire world of sports, but the realities of the cold war helped force progress for the simple reason that success of U.S. women could boost the medal count versus the Soviets. On the Stadio Olimpico track, in the late-summer heat, the rise of women was helped immeasurably by the radiance of sprinter Wilma Rudolph and the Tigerbelles, who came out of Coach Ed Temple’s little program at Tennessee State University to capture the world’s admiration and inspire women athletes for generations thereafter.
It is with the Tigerbelles and Rafer Johnson, two years before Rome, that the story begins.
ROME 1960
1
ALL THE WAY TO MOSCOW
DARKNESS fell slowly in midsummer Moscow, but the Americans arrived so late that the chartered buses needed headlights to illumine the ride from the airport. Every now and then, for no readily apparent reason, the Russian drivers clicked off the lights, drove a few blocks through the crepuscular murk, then turned on the beams again. The most mundane events can be charged with mystery the first time around, and this was a first for the passengers entering the Soviet capital on the Monday evening of July 21, 1958. They were members of the first U.S. track-and-field team to visit the USSR since the start of the cold war. Out the windows, flashes of light and shadow flitted by, a hypnotic passing scene: drunken men slouched in dimly lit doorways; armed soldiers at intersections; broad avenues with little traffic other than buses whose exhaust fumes fouled the humid air; and the occasional black sedan claiming the V
IP lane. When the Americans reached their hotel and checked into their rooms, they were struck by how heavy everything seemed. Bulky bedposts and thick, ponderous curtains.
Edward Stanley Temple had seen worse back home. As someone who had spent a lifetime dealing with alien environments because of his skin color alone, this one was not quite so unnerving. Moscow, to him, was just a stop on the road, another way for the coach and his athletes to get where he wanted them to go, past Russia and into history at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.
This leg of Temple’s improbable journey had begun three weeks earlier with a gesture of audacious confidence. As he was preparing to leave his home in Nashville for the Fourth of July weekend, he asked his wife, Charlie, to pack his suitcase with enough clothes for him to spend several weeks overseas. The request surprised her, since the schedule called for Temple, the women’s track coach at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University, to be away for only four days at the national championships in Morristown, New Jersey. That was just the first stop, he explained. Although nothing had been decided yet, he predicted that he and his Tigerbelles would be chosen to go from there all the way across the Atlantic for the first-ever dual track meet between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The fact that Temple booked a Ladd Bus Company charter for the ride to New Jersey underscored his conviction of better things to come. For years his track team had traveled in two clunky station wagons—four or five girls per car—one driven by him, the other by his friend, the photographer Earl Clanton, who had coined the team’s evocative Tigerbelles nickname, a felicitous melding of tiger and southern belle. Their traditional road trips ventured deeper into Jim Crow territory, to track relays at Tuskegee Institute or Alabama State, and followed a familiar pattern. Late on a Friday, often around midnight, they broke away from the hilly campus in north Nashville, the waybacks jumbled with gym duffels, starting blocks, hammers, spikes, purses, curling irons, and meals of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and apples packed in brown paper bags. It was best if they filled the gas tank beforehand; getting service at a station along the way could be a dicey proposition. And the fewer stops, the safer.
Temple grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and he recruited a few athletes from the projects in Chicago and New York, but most of his runners came out of rural Georgia towns like Jakin, Griffin, and Bloomingdale. They had seen Whites Only signs all their lives and knew how to keep on going. At some point there would be a shout from the back: time to “hit the fields.” It was both polite code and bleak reality, meaning pull over to the shoulder of the highway so they could scramble into the darkness for relief. As the caravan approached its destination, an order would come from the front: “Get your stuff together.” This meant rollers off, lipstick on, everything brushed and straightened. The sprinters were a free-spirited group; some chafed at Coach Temple’s rules of behavior but grudgingly obliged. “I want foxes, not oxes,” he told them. The Tigerbelles had perfected the art of emerging from the least flattering conditions looking as fresh as a gospel choir, for which they were often mistaken.
The Independence Day expedition north to what the track world called the nationals was different from the usual road trip. There was no need to hit the fields; the Ladd bus had its own lavatory. And no more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Once they escaped the borders of the old Confederacy, Coach Temple and his team could find more possible places to stop and eat, within means of their paltry budget, which allowed about $6 per athlete for breakfast and dinner. His top-flight runners—including Lucinda Williams, Barbara Jones, Isabelle Daniels, and Margaret Matthews—brought along suitcases even bigger than his. Like him, they figured victory would come their way in Morristown, and after that they would go on to the Soviet Union.
All of his best sprinters, that is, except the one who was not there. As a sixteen-year-old high school girl two years earlier, Wilma Glodean Rudolph had run with the Tigerbelles on the bronze-medal-winning 4 x 100 meter relay team at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Since then, she had trained regularly at Temple’s clinics for high school girls at Tennessee State and had graduated from Burt High in Clarksville, a tobacco town forty-five miles northwest of Nashville, where she also starred in basketball. All of her accomplishments had been stunningly against the odds, from the time she had been born two months premature, weighing less than five pounds. At age four, she had endured scarlet fever, double pneumonia, and polio, crippling her left leg and forcing her to wear orthopedic shoes and metal leg braces for several years. By her adolescence, after years of weekly bus trips for treatments at a clinic in Nashville, she had overcome all that and blossomed into a lithe, flowing runner. Now her freshman year in college was approaching, and Wilma was about to become a full-fledged Tigerbelle, but for the time being she was out of action. If outsiders asked about her, Temple told them she had appendicitis. In fact, she was about to give birth to a baby girl. She had gone from Olympic medalist heroine to expectant unmarried mother, alone and mortified.
Temple had another saying: “It’s a short distance between a pat on the back and a kick in the ass.” He had seen how people had soured on Rudolph when she got pregnant. And one of his own iron-clad rules was no mothers allowed on the team. But Wilma was so different, the sweetest girl he had ever met, and she ran with such beautiful ease. Her older sister Yvonne in St. Louis would take the baby temporarily, she said, if Coach let her come back. Temple relented. Wilma could join the Tigerbelles when they returned from this trip.
Women’s track and field was an odd little outpost on the frontier of sports in 1958 America, forlorn and largely scorned. Female athletes were not recognized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Only a few colleges, most of them historically black schools in the South, had track-and-field programs, but even they competed under the rules of the Amateur Athletic Union, not the NCAA. When Temple was named head coach at Tennessee A&I State after graduating in 1950, it was because nobody else wanted the job. His starting salary was $150 a month, which, when added to his pay for teaching social science courses, brought in a yearly sum of $5,196. His only other enticement was that he could move from East Dormitory room 305 (where he had survived four years on the boisterous floor with the sarcastic motto “Three-o-five will keep you alive”) down to a larger room on the first floor. His first team budget was under $1,000. The campus’s old cinder track encircled a football field and was often torn up by behemoths’ cleats; Temple was constantly raking it himself. When weather forced his Tigerbelles indoors, they ran in a gym barely fifty yards long where they were in danger of slamming into a wall if they failed to negotiate a double doorway leading out to the hall.
By the mid-fifties, even after Temple had established his program and led it to a national title, the athletic department still would not give him a desk, let alone an office. He shared a cramped cubbyhole with his wife, who was campus postmistress, and borrowed her desk. There were no scholarships for his athletes, so he found them work-study jobs at the post office. As minimal as these conditions were, Tennessee State at least had a program, more than most schools could say, and a winning one at that. Tuskegee had paved the way in the 1940s, but by the late fifties, the Tigerbelles dominated.
Aside from those two black Southern colleges, most of the teams competing at the nationals were northern big-city AAU clubs: Queens Mercurettes, Chicago Comets, New York Police Athletic League, Cleveland Recreation Department, Liberty Athletic Club of Boston, South Pacific Association of Los Angeles, German-American Athletic Club of New York. None of those squads had enough talent or depth to mount a challenge to Tennessee State at Morristown. By the end of the day on July 5, the Tigerbelles had won the team title by amassing 110 points, more than twice as many as the second-place Mercurettes, and all of their top sprinters had won, including the relay foursome of Daniels, Williams, Jones, and Matthews, who set a new American women’s record at 46.9 seconds.
Along with the winning relay team, the top two
finishers in each of nine events qualified for the combined squad of men and women competing in the unprecedented track meet against the Soviets to be held in Moscow at the end of the month.
By the end of the tournament, AAU officials had yet to name a coach for the women’s squad. Temple had heard that they were leaning toward a white coach from the New York Police Athletic League. He also believed that he had one key ally on the board making the decision that night, Frances Sobczak Kaszubski of Cleveland. Like him, Kaszubski carried her own outsider’s burden in the world of amateur sports. Only ten years earlier, when she had competed as a discus thrower at the 1948 Olympics, she had been so disregarded by the male-dominated U.S. Olympic Committee that she had to pay her own way, an experience that at once demoralized her and drove her to devote her life to ensuring that girls coming later had more support. Now, as the top woman representative on the AAU track-and-field committee, she respected Temple and what his women had endured in the face of prejudice. She also realized that, for all practical purposes, without the Tigerbelles there would be no U.S. women’s team. Temple looked up to Big Kaszubski, who stood 6-foot-1, towering 5 inches over him. Mutt and Jeff, he called them. She was tough, with her Kaszubski Rules of Order, and could use her size to intimidate, he thought, but she was also sympathetic.
To emphasize how much he wanted the coaching job, he presented his case to her in dramatic terms that night. “The brass came in from New York,” Temple later recalled. “They had this big tent, and they were going in this tent, and Frances was going to be there, and I wasn’t. And I said, ‘Frances, you going to that meeting?’ She said yes. I said, ‘Well, now, let me tell you something.’ And this is exactly what I told her. I said, ‘I got eight people on this team: everybody in the hundred, everybody in the two hundred, the relay, long jump, hurdles.’ I said, ‘We came up here on a chartered bus, and that bus is leaving here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’ I said, ‘Now, you go in there and tell them that if I am not on this trip, all eight of ’em will be on the bus going back to Nashville, Tennessee.’ Her eyes got as big as fish, and when they came out of the meeting, she said, ‘Ed Temple, you’re the coach!’”
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