Across the city, in the larger Palazzo dello Sport, an arena filled to the rafters with rabid Italian boxing fans, Cassius Clay took on the Soviet surge alone that day. His opponent in a quarterfinal bout was Gennady Shatkov, a veteran Olympian who had won a gold medal in Melbourne as a middleweight but had moved up to fight as a light heavyweight in Rome. Clay had won one bout already, stopping a muscular Belgian named Yvon Becaus with a left hook and right cross with 1:10 remaining in the second round of the three-round match. Becaus was “the strongest man I’ve met, but he was crude,” Clay had declared afterward.
Shatkov was anything but crude. A scholar outside the ring who would go on to receive a law degree, he was a keen student of the sweet science who had fought hundreds of matches in his career and had a punch that one Soviet journalist said “you felt first and saw later.” Jules Menendez of San Jose State, the U.S. Olympic boxing coach, thought Shatkov was a prime example of Soviet strengths: age and experience. In Moscow alone, Menendez told Ring magazine, there were six thousand amateur boxers and one hundred twenty trainers. The average age of the Russians competing in Rome was twenty-six or twenty-seven, whereas the American boys were eighteen and nineteen. Clay knew nothing about Shatkov, but the Soviets had carefully observed him. Their scouting report: “He is tall, magnificently built, moves lightly, and has an excellent sense of distance.”
Although only eighteen, Clay did not lack experience. He learned how to box when he was eleven, and by the time he reached Rome, he had fought in 128 official amateur bouts, nearly half ending in knockouts. Early in his career, he exhibited an urgency to be in the spotlight that made him at once charming and irritating. Nikos Spanakos, his teammate on the Olympic team, would always remember the time he and his brother, Pete, another boxer, were getting off a plane with Clay after a Golden Gloves meet in Chicago. “As we were coming off, photographers came out to take our pictures, and Cassius actually pushed us aside and got in the middle so he could be the center of attention,” Spanakos said. “That was Cassius.”
Traditionalists thought his style in the ring could be obnoxious as well. On April 28, 1959, at the Pan American Games Trials at the old tan sandstone and red-roofed UW Field House in Madison, Wisconsin, Clay approached John Walsh, the University of Wisconsin’s veteran coach. Clay boasted about his first match victory over Leroy Bogar of Minneapolis, during which he had danced and jabbed and at times seemed to taunt his opponent before knocking him out in 1:42 of the second round. Had Walsh seen it? Clay asked. “I couldn’t stand it,” Walsh replied, according to the boxing writer Jim Doherty. “I got up and left.” The next day, Clay suffered a rare loss, eliminated from the Pan Am team by a tall left-handed marine named Amos Johnson. Clay, stunned, said he had a hard time figuring out the lefty. Spanakos, who was also there, recalled that Clay had eaten “six plates of spaghetti” the night before at a local restaurant, “and the guy hit him in the belly, and he didn’t make it.” The loss did nothing to diminish Clay’s expectations. He boasted on his way out of Madison that he would make the Olympic team the next year and win a gold medal.
The Olympic Trials, a three-day tournament that began on May 19, 1960, were held at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Scores of amateur boxers were there, champions from the army, navy, air force, marines, AAU, NCAA, and eastern and western Golden Gloves tournaments. Only ten would make it to Rome. Clay’s first opponent was another tough marine, Henry Hooper, who fought him to a draw until the middle of the third round, when Clay landed a devastating right that knocked Hooper down for the ten count. In the semifinals, he beat the air force champ, Fred Lewis. Jack Fiske, the expert boxing writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, was ringside and noted that Clay had not endeared himself to the Cow Palace aficionados. “The crowd booed cocky Cassius Clay’s clear cut decision…” Fiske reported. “The fans were displeased because of the eighteen-year-old high school student’s clowning tactics against the wild swinging Lewis. The loser, from Phoenix, packed plenty of power and was willing enough but was no match for Clay’s ramrod left jabs and right smashes to the head.”
In the final against Allen Hudson, a soldier from New York City, Clay was leading early in the third round when he was floored by a wild left elbow. The referee ruled it a knockdown, infuriating Clay. He came back with two quick rights to the chin, and Hudson fell against the ropes and collapsed to the mat, spitting blood, looking dazed. Referee Vern Bybee moved in to examine Hudson, who signaled that he wanted to keep fighting. Then came another ferocious Clay right, and Bybee stopped it. Hudson could not believe the match was over, Fiske reported. He “leaped into the air in a rage and threw himself to the canvas and nearly went berserk while appealing to his corner and the referee.”
Now, three and a half months later, inside the noisy arena in Rome, Clay found himself up against a fighter who in many ways was a smaller, older, Russian version of himself. Gennady Shatkov, like Clay, preferred to work at a distance, using quick, powerful jabs and fast footwork to keep opponents off balance. But precisely because he was much smaller than Clay, Shatkov was frustrated. “The main thing was that I could not find the right plan for the fight,” he said later. “Clay works at the same distance in the same way as I did when I boxed at my own weight, but now, however, I had to go inside myself. That is, do exactly what Clay expected me to do.” Keeping Shatkov at a distance, Clay scored with single punches, while Shatkov could not reach him.
“At the break my coach told me to work close in and attack,” Shatkov recalled. “‘Easier said than done,’ I thought. Fifteen centimeters height advantage certainly makes a difference.” The second round went much like the first, and by the third round Shatkov realized that he would be unable to penetrate Clay’s defenses and did not have the power to mount an attack. “I lost like a middleweight to an excellent light heavyweight,” he said. “I shook Clay’s hand. It was no disgrace to lose to a boxer like that.”
Here was an athlete who seemed to have a wiser perspective on losing than most sportswriters. Shatkov’s defeat was no different than John Thomas’s in the high jump, or Dave Sime’s and Ray Norton’s in the 100-meter dash. It would be hard for outsiders to accept, but athletes understood. Usually you lose because someone else is better that day.
Interlude
DESCENDING WITH GRATITUDE
IT could be said that Joe Faust failed at the Rome Olympics, coming up short after working toward a single moment for seven years, but his disappointment was not written into the larger drama of the U.S. men’s track-and-field team on what came to be known as Black Thursday. Few had heard of Faust before or after September 1, 1960, and he was virtually invisible at the competition, withdrawing after the preliminary round in the high jump. He barely dragged his pained body over the bar at 6-43/4, then bowed out, finishing in seventeenth place, which was far worse than he might have done but better than fourteen other jumpers from Tunisia to Iceland. That is how most Olympic athletes finish, unknown and unseen, away from the glare of media hype and patriotic hope. Like any of them, Faust would have been delighted to win a gold medal at the Stadio Olimpico, but he understood that in the larger scheme of things it would not have mattered, and the scheme of things is what he was all about.
There had been a touch of fame in the family before his athletic career. His father, Louis (Bob) Faust, was an actor who played a villain in several John Wayne movies, including the 1947 Angel and the Badman. Bob assumed the role of bad man in the family, too, leaving his pregnant wife and seven children. Joe was five when his parents separated, and spent much of his childhood with a foster family in Culver City. He was a normal kid except in two respects: he had wondrous spring in his legs and religious curiosity in his heart. By age ten he was a precocious Catholic, searching for the spiritual essence of life.
His junior high track coach noticed Joe’s exuberant bounce and quickly steered him toward the high jump. It was 1953, and together they developed an ambitious long-term plan to get to the 1960 Olympics. One out of a million
chance, perhaps. “But I believed him,” Faust said of his coach. “And we started working.” His first jump was 3-foot-7, but by the end of that year he was at five-eight and moving higher by the week. He did the straddle jump, like most jumpers of that era, approaching the bar from a left angle and kicking up and over with his lead arm and leg. “I loved seeing the bar as I went over it,” he said, something no high jumper would do in later decades after Dick Fosbury introduced the revolutionary Fosbury Flop, going over shoulders first, torso and head skyward. At fifteen Faust cleared the bar at 6-8, setting a new standard for his age group, and as he approached age seventeen he was recruited to jump at UCLA.
Faust lasted a month there, dropped out, and transferred to nearby Occidental College. He had been valedictorian of his high school class, but school now was all confusion to him. The seven-year plan to reach the Olympics still drove him, and he worked out twice a day, all the while feeling pangs of guilt about “the achievement complex.” Jumping was his ambition and salvation; he infused it with religious symbolism.
Each jump had its own ritual; what he called the cycle of repair. He looked at the crossbar and saw the crucifix. As he approached, he imagined jumping into the arms of a loving God. He rose with penance, sorry for his sins, and descended with gratitude, thankful for love and forgiveness. Over and over again, penance and gratitude, sin and redemption, repairing himself inside and out, jumping a hundred times a day. It was all deeply personal and private. He never talked about it to others, never boasted that God was on his side. His heavenly thanks were not for how high he jumped, but simply for the act of jumping at all.
By July 1, 1960, Faust was exceptional enough to compete at the Olympic Trials at Stanford. Everything felt right that day. He was struck by the beautiful care with which Payton Jordan, the Stanford track coach, had prepared the stadium. The grass was a velvet cut of green, the track smooth and flawless, the takeoff area with just the right bounce, the landing pit soft and inviting. Hours before the competition, Faust went off by himself to meditate, visualizing his jumps. There were thirteen competitors, led by John Thomas, the amazing leaper from Boston U., and Charley Dumas, the defending Olympic champ. All the attention was on Thomas, as he set a new world record, but there was a lively contest for the other two Olympic slots. When the height reached 6-9, seven jumpers were still around. Faust nicked the crossbar on his first two jumps and was on the verge of elimination. “I started visualizing the prayer part,” he said later of his preparations for the third try. “I dedicated the next jump to all the people who might be on crutches around the world. But it was not a trade-off with God. It was a feeling of, Why leave anyone behind?”
He cleared the bar with ease. And then 6-10, and 6-11, and finally he soared over 7 feet for the first time in his life and clinched a spot on the team.
It turned out that his father was in the stadium that day. Angel and the badman. When Joe soared over the bar at seven feet, Bob Faust rushed to the edge of the track at the north end, closest to the high-jump pit. A security officer held him back, until he shouted, “That’s my son!” Joe came over to greet him. He had never seen his dad so full of joy.
That moment, as it turned out, was the Olympic peak for jumping Joe Faust. A few days later he strained a disc in his lower back. Determined to fulfill the seven-year plan, he gutted it out at practice meets in Oregon and Switzerland, wincing in pain but showing just enough to keep his place on the team. He was still only seventeen when he reached Rome, the youngest man on the track-and-field squad, and he soaked it all in, joining the throngs who saw Pope John XXIII at the Vatican, mixing with foreign athletes, even coming to the aid of Leif Kvist, a young man from Sweden who had lost all his money and had been standing outside the gates of the village, broke and starving, until Joe brought him food from the bounteous Olympic cafeteria.
Then came the day of competition, the anticlimax, a jump of 6-43/4 and no more.
Athletes can spend the rest of their lives with regret, wondering what might have been. Joe Faust went back to California and wanted to become a Trappist monk. He fasted outside the gates of the Abbey of New Clairvaux up near Vina for three days and asked to be called Zachary, but he could not clear his mind of images of a woman he had fallen in love with and decided the monastic calling was not for him, not exactly. Over the years, he married, had children, got divorced, and struggled with questions he could not answer. He wondered what purpose God could invest in a molecule two thousand feet underground. What part did that molecule play in the scheme of life? It was a hole in his theological construct that remained unfilled for years, until it came to him that a single molecule had its own graceful movement, with its neutrons and electrons, and was connected to all other movement in the universe. “That lonely molecule is not so lonely,” he decided.
Nearly a half century after his moment in Rome, Faust, in his mid-sixties, lived a monastic life alone in a cramped room in a cottage nestled on the side of a scrubby tan hill just off the 710 Freeway not far from Cal State, Los Angeles. Inside his room, he had a table, a filing cabinet (folders on new high-jump landing pit designs, trash technology, mind and spirit notes), a shelf of books (The Joy of Mathematics, The Sistine Chapel, The Child’s Creation of a Pictorial World), another shelf of food (cereal, bananas, seven-grain bread, grapes, oranges), a small refrigerator, a sofa bed, and a computer. There were makeshift shelves and a grill out near the side door. It seemed all he needed. He was like a single molecule of Olympic history buried deep underground, alone, but still moving, and in his movement connected to everything else. Once he knew Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph, Cassius Clay.
The backyard had the markings of a scavenger, a cluttered junk-yard of collected planks of oak, sheets of plywood, scraps of iron, chunks of cement, bricks, stones, all arranged in a haphazard yet loving array. Down at the bottom third of the yard there was a clearing with an old mattress on the ground, and a further look showed two poles rising at either end, a bamboo crossbar nearby, and a worn path in the dirt coming from the left toward the tattered mattress. With no one watching, Joe Faust was high-jumping still, with a sore knee but bounce in his step, practicing his cycle of repair, rising with penance, clearing the crucifix, absolving his sins, descending with gratitude.
11
THE WIND AT HER BACK
ED TEMPLE was so worried about forgetting some minor detail that he barely slept at night in his dormitory room at the Olympic Village. Preparing for a race made him more anxious than the competition itself. He had ten runners in his charge, seven of them Tigerbelles, each with her own idiosyncrasies and different schedule of heats. Some coaches simply told their athletes when to show up and met them there, but Temple was not that relaxed. He waited outside the women’s gate at the village every day and peppered them with questions before they boarded the shuttle bus to the event. Do you have your shoes with you? Are you wearing your USA uniform? Do you have your official number vest? Did you remember your starting blocks? On the bus to the practice area at the Stadio dei Marmi, he was still talking, usually as a diversion, except to those few who preferred silence. “Those who didn’t want to talk, I wouldn’t talk to because they were concentrating. Others wanted to run their mouth. People act in different ways. Then at the practice area I would stand on the field while they were warming up. I might have a conversation with them: Have you written home? Have you heard anything from home? Have you seen so-and-so? Just to get their mind off it.”
Wilma Rudolph, his star sprinter, could have had several troubling things on her mind when they reached the practice field on Friday afternoon, September 2. First, there were concerns about her physical condition. During a training jog with the Tigerbelles a few days earlier, she had stepped in a sprinkling hole and twisted her left ankle. It happened during a warm down, four laps around the field at the end of practice, part of the Coach Temple routine. “She was talking and trying to jog at the same time, and wasn’t looking where she was going, and she put her foot in this hol
e, and she fell down. We got her up and everything, and she was able to walk on one foot a little, but limping, and we got her to the trainer, and the trainer taped it and iced her down. We waited until the next morning, and it was a little sore, but she was able to run with the ankle taped up.” The night before the race, Temple had taken Wilma and the Tigerbelles to watch Cassius Clay and the other American boxers compete at the Palazzo dello Sport. When her ankle seemed to be swelling again during the matches, he had made a trip to the refreshment stand and bought a Coca-Cola “just to get the ice, and sat there holding it on her ankle.”
Along with lingering concern about the sore ankle, which seemed better that morning, there was the mental anguish of watching her close companion Ray Norton—billed as the next Jesse Owens—finish dead last in the men’s 100 the day before, sending the American press corps to the thesaurus in search of hyperbolic Armageddon metaphors. In consoling Norton after his defeat, the “heartsick” Rudolph had vowed to win a gold medal in his honor. But would that promise burden her with too much pressure now in the final of the women’s 100, not her best event? As Armin Hary had demonstrated, the start could be crucial, and with her long legs, Wilma was no better than average getting out of the blocks.
Rome 1960 Page 21
