“Patterson said, ‘Hi, boy. How’s your dad?’ Clay and his father had gone to Indianapolis three years earlier to meet Patterson at an exhibition. Clay loomed over Patterson. ‘Look, I’m three inches taller than him,’ he told reporters. ‘When I fill out, I’ll be bigger all around. That’s something good to know. You see, I may have to fight him some day.’”
From the sprinter Dave Sime came another story of Clay encountering Patterson that morning of September 6. As Sime remembered it, he was sitting at the breakfast table in the cafeteria with Clay and a group of black American runners and boxers. “We were kidding around in this huge Quonset hut of a dining facility, and Floyd was coming toward us. Cassius said, ‘Watch this, I’m going to get this guy. Watch this!’ And as Floyd is walking by, he jumps up on the table with his knife and fork and says, ‘I’m having you next! I’m having you for dinner!’ Patterson walked by and chuckled. Floyd took it as a joke. He was laughing. Floyd dismissed him as a kid. We were all cracking up.”
Ed Temple had yet another story. He remembered sitting on a stoop outside the cafeteria with Clay when a bunch of people ran by after spotting Patterson in the distance. When Temple asked Clay whether he wanted to follow them, Clay said no, “I ain’t going to see no Floyd Patterson, because I’m going to be heavyweight champ myself some day.” Temple could only shake his head at the kid’s audacity.
Several photographs were taken that day showing Clay posing with Patterson, so that much is established fact. If other details in the various accounts conflicted, they also fit a pattern. Throughout his life as Cassius Clay, and later as Muhammad Ali, it would require literal vigilance to separate the real from the apocryphal in stories about him. Many he would concoct himself, some would be enhanced by others, but all were in service of the mythology of a self-invented character who became everything his vivid imagination could dream of and more. And all of it flowed from his inaugural performance on the world stage in Rome, where his actions were not yet infused with much larger symbolic meaning but seemed more a source of mild annoyance or comic relief.
Rafer Johnson was also up early. He had slept fitfully, his mind racing with his shortcomings in the first day of the decathlon and his expectations for the second. On the bus to the stadium, Johnson felt anxious, under more pressure than he had ever faced. His stomach was upset, not just from nerves but also from the huge meal he had eaten at midnight. His muscles were sore from the fourteen-hour day ending with the merciless 400-meter dash in the late evening chill. “The four hundred really takes you down,” Johnson explained later. “You’ve got to recover from that, and you don’t eat right and you don’t sleep. And you come back the next morning…”
It was humid by the time he reached the track, with a draining early heat. Far from top form, Johnson made a tactical mistake before the opening event, the 110-meter high hurdles, in failing to stretch adequately. “I have a routine that I always do, and it can be a hundred twenty degrees out or freezing, and I still do that routine,” he recalled. “But because I was so tired from all the stuff that happened the day before, the length of the day and no sleep, I underdid my warm-ups, and I wasn’t ready to run that race.” Hurdling was one of Johnson’s specialties, an event he relied on to build his second-day cushion. But everything went wrong this time. He got off to a slow start, was thrown off his stride, nicked the second hurdle, stumbled and nearly fell, and was struggling to hang in there for the rest of the race. He finished with his worst time since before Melbourne, 15.3 seconds, nearly a second slower than his fastest efforts. Yang had no troubles in his heat, clearing the hurdles with excellent form and busting the tape at 14.6 seconds. The result was a swing of 183 points, putting C.K. in front by 128. The stoic Johnson thrived on pressure, but this was pushing him to the brink. Leaving the track, he walked toward his coach’s seat in the stands. “Don’t worry,” Ducky Drake told him, “it’s not over. You’ve got your best events coming.”
The seventh event, the discus, was scheduled to get under way at 10:10, but the qualifying throws for the regular discus competition were taking place then, so the decathletes had to wait until those were done. When Johnson’s turn finally arrived, his timing was off on his first throw, and again on his second. Invigorated with a sudden surge of energy for his final effort, he flung the discus 159 feet 1 inch. It was not his longest throw ever, but given the pressure he was under, he considered it one of the most competitive moments of his career. Yang could not reach 132 feet, and with another swing in momentum, Johnson was back in the lead by 144 points with three events to go after the lunch break: pole vault, javelin, and 1500 meters.
Few Olympic athletes knew one another as thoroughly as Rafer Johnson and C. K. Yang. It was not just that both had trained at UCLA for the same event under the same coaches. A deeper sensibility seemed at work in their symbiotic relationship, a spirited blend of admiration and competitiveness that pushed them to greater accomplishments together than they might have achieved apart. When Yang arrived in Los Angeles from Taiwan three years earlier, he spoke little English and was intimidated by Johnson, who had been his hero. “Are you the right C. K. Yang?” the school’s assistant track coach, Craig Dixon, asked when first catching sight of him. “How come you’re so skinny?” At Dixon’s urging, C.K. started building his body at a downtown gym, working out with Jack LaLanne. Johnson embraced him from the start. “When I got there I had no friends,” Yang recalled. “Rafer took me under his wing. He even took me home to Kingsburg, where I met his family.” Their bond transcended the language barrier. Johnson later remembered that when C.K. arrived, “he handled English like I handled Chinese. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all he wanted to eat was beefsteak!”
Rafer was the mentor in their relationship, yet he insisted that he learned as much from C.K. as the other way around. He considered it a “blessing” that Yang came to UCLA, he said later. “C.K. was the most knowledgeable athlete at what he did. I always had an extra coach there with him. We talked about almost every event. I did more questioning of him than he of me.” But the ordeal of Rome, years of work narrowing down to a final three events, tested the generous nature of their friendship. Rafer had no interest in talking to C.K. that morning, nor did C.K. want to talk to Rafer. All through lunch they kept apart. “It was just so intense, we had to get a little distance,” Johnson remembered.
Until, that is, the pole vault, an event at which Yang excelled and Johnson struggled. In previous competitions, Yang regularly beat Johnson by a foot or more. Now Rafer needed all the help he could get. First to his aid was the Soviet star, Kuznetsov, resigned to third place but scoring strongly in second-day events, who whispered some advice to the American about how to move his hands up the pole during the approach. Then Yang broke the silence and huddled with Johnson briefly, going over the best speed for his run and most effective posture for planting the pole. They were mostly their own coaches during the Olympic competition; Ducky Drake was allowed no closer than a front row seat, and they could not stop themselves from coaching each other even now. Johnson, certain that his gold medal dream was on the line, pushed his body to a personal best of 13 feet 53/8 inches. This was before the era of springy fiberglass poles that sent pole-vault heights into a loftier dimension. After clearing just over 14-1, Yang ordered the crossbar moved up to 14-9, hoping to pull away with a personal best of his own. His powerful approach sent him up high enough, but his body brushed the bar on the way over—and he had to settle for the lower score. There are so many what-ifs in the decathlon, and here was another: What if Yang had cleared that height? He would have seized the lead yet again and virtually clinched the gold. Instead, Johnson’s best-ever vault kept him in front, though by a mere 24 points.
APART FROM the relays, scheduled for Thursday, this was the final afternoon of running competition on the track, and two premier events remained: the 400-meter dash and the 1500 meters. It was about 3:20 that afternoon when the six finalists for the 400 settled into the blocks for their staggere
d start. The sextet was stellar, led by Carl Kaufmann of Germany, who was assigned the inside lane. Otis Davis of the U.S. stood two lanes over in Lane 3, Malcolm Spence of South Africa next to Davis, and then Milkha Singh of India in Lane 5.
Of that group, the most exotic certainly was Singh. Part of it was his wondrous nickname, the Flying Sikh. Then there was his striking image on the track—running in full beard with his long hair, normally covered in a turban, instead “tied overhead in a topknot with a small chiffon handkerchief.” And finally, his uncommon speed came with a moving life story. If the Olympic Movement idealized the notion that all people could live and compete in harmony, here was another lesson in the real-world obstacles to that vision. Singh was only eleven years old in 1947, when he witnessed the worst that man can do to man. He was living with his parents and other Sikh relatives in a city then known as Lyallpur inside the boundaries of the new nation of Pakistan. During the bloodletting that accompanied the partition of India and Pakistan, he watched as his parents were killed by Pakistani Muslims. With no adults to help him, he joined the desperate migration of Sikhs across the border into India, making the final leg of the journey by clinging to the side of a refugee-packed train rolling into Delhi.
From that difficult childhood, Singh had risen to star status in India, a country not known for its track prowess. After feeling outclassed as a novice twenty-year-old sprinter at the Melbourne Games, he began studying the techniques and workout schedules of American 400-meter runners and trained under a U.S. coach who had been sent to India by the State Department. Year by year he improved his times, taking first place in the 400 at both the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games in 1958 and snatching several victories on the European tour in 1960. The Flying Sikh arrived in Rome as a favorite of the world press. “We can’t automatically assume that the admirable Indian runner, Milkha Singh, will be beaten,” wrote Edouard Seidler of France’s L’Équipe. “We’re continually impressed by his training and the consummate art of his running. Is he capable of running in a near world record time? Yes!” The Washington Post’s Shirley Povich was another believer, writing that “Milkha could be the first bearded winner of the 400 meters in Olympic history.”
As he entered the stadium for the final, Singh felt “quite relaxed,” but by the time he lined up for the start, his nerves were eating at him. He realized that he had never run in a field this strong. He had beaten the South African Spence in the Commonwealth Games, but both Davis and Kaufmann had coasted to wins ahead of him in the preliminary heats in Rome, and they seemed capable of more—blasting through the 400 faster than the bearded one had dreamed of running. Kaufmann had his legion of German fans chanting his name now, but Davis was the runner Singh feared most. The scariest thing about Otis Crandall Davis was that at the relatively ancient age of twenty-eight, perhaps because he had come to running so late in his career, he seemed only now to be reaching his peak.
Davis came from Bill Bowerman’s renowned track program at the University of Oregon, but he was not a typical Bowerman product. At a school that specialized in white distance runners, Davis was a black sprinter who had taken up the sport very late. He grew up in Tuscaloosa, in the shadows of the University of Alabama (a school that he could not attend because of the color of his skin), joined the air force for four years out of high school in the early 1950s, and from there ended up in California, playing basketball at Los Angeles City College and cleaning toilets at an aeronautics plant. A skinny six-one rebounder who could run forever on the fast break, Davis was offered a scholarship to play basketball at Oregon, but he never adapted to the conservative style of play there and ended up on the track team. Kenny Moore, who grew up in Eugene and went on to become a world-class marathoner and writer, remembered how as adolescents he and his pals were all attracted to the newcomer. “We instantly adored this gentle, bemused black man, the first most of us had been anywhere near, save for some gospel singers who came through at church.”
In fact, Davis was burning inside and did not feel so gentle or bemused, though he would never show that to the local kids. As Bowerman told the story later, the basketball coach, frustrated by Davis’s play, urged the track coach to take a look at him. Davis would later insist that this was myth and that he decided on his own to go out for track. Whatever the case, Bowerman tried “Ote”—as he called Davis—first in the high jump, then the 100, then the 200. “I didn’t know how to start, but I seemed to be a good finisher,” Davis recalled, and that characteristic eventually led him to the longest sprint, the 400. His first year at that distance was “trial and error.” At the NCAA tournament at Indiana University he ran too fast, burned out in the homestretch, and was passed by the entire field. “Then I went to an AAU race in Colorado, and they said I ran too slow. I just had to figure things out.”
At the Olympic Trials at Stanford, he finished third, barely making the team, but from there he got stronger week by week, his times dropping steadily during the warm-up meets in California, Oregon, and Switzerland. Bowerman was mostly preoccupied with his milers, Dyrol Burleson and Jim Grelle, both of whom had also made the Olympic squad. His advice to Davis was to stay with the pack for the first 200, coast the third 100, and then burn his way home. Davis listened but felt that he was finding a rhythm on his own. “Each week I was learning, so the timing of Rome was just right,” he said. Walking out toward the track from the Stadio Olimpico tunnel for the final, a feeling washed over him that he had never felt before. It was a sensation of “sheer concentration, singleness of purpose.” If Milkha Singh was suddenly overtaken by nerves as he knelt at the starting blocks, Davis felt just the opposite, a supreme confidence. Whoever was going to win would have to come by me first, he said to himself.
At the gun, Singh and Spence set the early pace while Davis got off to his usual slow start. “I saw the Indian guy in the corner of my eye,” Davis said later. “He was outside of me. I knew the pace had to be fast.” Spence and Singh were clocked nearly a half-second ahead at the 200-meter mark as they approached the curve. “Then Davis accelerated so violently and so irresistibly” that he flashed into the lead, Neil Allen noted in his diary. The stadium erupted in a roar, electrified by Davis’s charge. The Flying Sikh looked to his side to gauge his position, thinking the pace was too fast and that he had better slow down. At that very moment, Davis passed him, followed by Kaufmann. “That fraction of a second decided my fate,” Singh reflected later. With 100 meters left, he had dropped from the front to near the back. Davis was now ahead. Watching in the stands, Coach Bowerman was worried that Davis had surged too soon. Had he? The lead was almost seven yards, then five, then three, and two. Kaufmann was closing ferociously, making up ground as they neared the tape. But Davis, thinking only of reaching the end, blocking out the fatigue, refused to fade.
Davis ran upright—“swayback,” he called it—with his hands in front of him, while the German leaned far forward at the end, his head low, his hands winging behind him as though he were preparing to dive into a pool. Kaufmann splattered into hard cinder instead, sprawling onto the track. Davis felt the tape break at his chest and knew that he had won, but the judges were not sure. It looked too close to call, another photo finish. Paralleling Kaufmann’s closing surge on Davis, Singh had narrowed the gap on Spence, the space between them so narrow that they, too, had to wait for a final ruling. Every second feels like an hour in a situation like that. This wait was nearly fifteen minutes, an eternity. Finally the names flashed on the electronic scoreboard: 1—Davis, 2—Kaufmann, 3—Spence, 4—Singh. All four had broken the Olympic record, and Davis had smashed the world record, coming in at 44.9, the first ever to run under the 45-second mark.
When Davis learned of the results, he jumped high into the air in sheer joy, legs wide apart, arms high above his head. Then he dropped his track suit, picked it up, waved his hands all around, grabbed his face in disbelief, overcome with emotion, shook hands with a straw-hatted judge, and twirled around, two 360-degree turns, hands over h
is eyes. His U.S. teammates rushed over to congratulate him as American fans in the stands, some wearing rain slickers, stood to cheer. “Something was pushing me out there,” he said. “And it wasn’t the wind.”
The Flying Sikh had been the first to shake Davis’s hand. Singh was heartbroken, feeling that he had disappointed his country, but in fact his showing was hailed back home. “He clocked his best,” wrote the columnist for the Times of India, “but that wasn’t good enough and one might venture to say that, all in all, no athlete could have done better under the circumstances. It is the Perfect Failure, and long after tiresome persons have finished lamenting that he did not secure even a bronze medal shall we remember the long months of preparation, the gradual improvement, and the great moment and the best performance of our versatile athlete. If Milkha Singh failed, it is a lesson to all athletic-minded people in this country of how much it takes to produce a world best. Shabash”—well done—“Milkha Singh!”
The photo-finish call on the 400 had taken so long that a loud hum was still reverberating inside the stadium in the aftermath of Davis’s record run when the 1500 field began to assemble on the track. Here was an impressive assortment of sub-four-minute men from Sweden, Norway, Romania, Hungary, the U.S., and France, but one among them seemed in a world of his own. Herb Elliott of Australia was the clear favorite. He had been blessed by none other than the godfather of milers, Roger Bannister, who described Elliott as if he were some primordial species born in the wilderness and bred for running. “To match his hawk nose and the gaunt, Viking manliness of his face, he has a lean body and a smooth stride, lithe and steady, about as gentle as a panther,” Bannister wrote in the Sunday Times. “At his coach [Percy] Cerutty’s Portsea training camp, he runs wild and barefoot along the beach, over sand dunes, seeking to replenish primitive energy sapped by the artificiality of track training. When running, he seems to achieve instinctive and unfettered expression of all his potentialities. Though he may very well have a racing brain, too, the refinement, pace, judgment, and tactics have so far been superfluous…Like so many Australians, he has a sense of freedom and is unafraid of enjoying his successes and making the most of them.”
Rome 1960 Page 30
