EIGHT LONG days and nights had passed since the first throwers assembled at the Stadio Olimpico. The shot-put final on August 31 turned out to be a sweep for the U.S. team. Now, after being shut out in the hammer throw, it was time to see if the Americans could bookend the shot-put accomplishment by dominating the discus. They came in with the defending Olympic champion, Al Oerter, a purchasing agent for a Long Island aircraft company, who felt renewed by a new diet, a weight-lifting program, and “a philosophy of life that concentrated on his health, his family, and himself.” A Polish thrower, Edmund Piatkowski, was highly regarded, and the Russians had talked about winning a medal, but the rest of the field seemed unthreatening; the home favorite, Italy’s Adolfo Consolini, the 1948 winner who had delivered the athlete’s oath at the Rome Games’ Opening Ceremony, was now an ancient relic competing in his fourth Olympics and was eliminated in the qualifying rounds. Oerter’s strongest competition promised to come from teammates Dick Cochran, the NCAA champ from Missouri, and Rink Babka, the Southern Cal grad who had tied the world record earlier that year and arrived in Rome confident he could win gold.
On that first day of track-and-field events eight days earlier, Babka was in the Olympic Village cafeteria, chatting with a group of teammates and drinking iced tea. He had been winging the discus over 200 feet in practice and never felt better, yet day after day he had watched various teammates falling sick. What was going on? Now he knew one reason. “The tea was OK, but the ice they were putting into it was chopped off blocks on the floor,” Babka recalled. That night, he felt too miserable to sleep. “I was losing my stomach in the bathtub.” At three in the morning, he staggered over to the infirmary for treatment, and spent the rest of the night talking with another ailing athlete, swimmer Paul Hait. Over the next week, as his competition approached, Babka could barely practice. Dogged by the heat and his upset stomach, he lost 14 pounds, from 265 down to 251, and was still trying to regain his strength as he sauntered toward the stadium’s discus area for the September 7 final.
Among the people watching the throwers in Rome was the person perhaps most responsible for Babka’s athletic career. This was thirty-two-year-old Otis Chandler, a strapping six-three “California redwood,” as he once was described, who had been a shot-put star at Stanford and whose self-described “biggest disappointment in life” to that point had come when a wrist injury prevented him from competing for the 1952 U.S. Olympic team. Chandler was better known as the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, a job his father, Norman Chandler, had bestowed upon him a few months before the Rome Games. Like Don Maxwell, editor of the Chicago Tribune, Chandler felt obliged to file a story or two while watching the Olympics. He had been among the American mourners after Black Thursday, particularly bemoaning the U.S. losses in women’s diving events and the men’s high jump. While the Europeans had obviously improved their techniques over the years, some American athletes seemed listless in Rome, he had written. “Whatever the cause, we are no longer invincible, for the rest of the world has caught up to us.”
Nearly ten years earlier, when Rink Babka was in junior high at Palo Alto, a self-described cowboy hick whose family had recently moved from Wyoming, the boys in his school were called to the gymnasium for a speech and special presentation by the great shot-putter with the famous Chandler name who attended college at nearby Stanford. “When he walked into the gym and our coach introduced him, Otis looked like Adonis; he was gorgeous,” Babka recalled. “In my mind, I went, ‘Jeez, look at a man that size.’ And he spoke so well. He talked about weight lifting, athletics, don’t smoke, don’t drink, go to college, get a degree. The typical rah-rah presentation. Then he asked—we were all squatting on the floor—‘Anybody want to learn to throw the shot put?’” Babka’s hand shot up reflexively, and after the speech he found himself heading out to the school field with Chandler and six classmates. When Babka’s turn came to try the shot, Chandler complimented him. “He said, ‘You have some potential here, young man.’ That is all he had to say for me. From then on, I always said the man who gave me a little bit of a nudge was Otis Chandler.”
Although Babka also excelled in basketball and football, and was recruited to Southern Cal primarily to play basketball, he eventually concentrated on the track-and-field throwing events, and narrowed that down to the discus because of a knee injury that made the violent plant-and-pound stress of the shot put difficult. He emerged as a world-class discus man at USC, trouncing most collegiate competitors and winning first place for the U.S. at the historic first dual meet with the Soviets in Moscow. After graduating in 1959, he landed a job with the Deutsch Company, an electronics firm in the Los Angeles area, that allowed him to slip out at three every afternoon to train at Southern Cal in preparation for the Olympics.
Throwing the discus required twisting, but not pounding, and Babka came to think of it as the most difficult and graceful of throwing events. Rotating around one and a half times, pivoting with the left foot, and landing in the middle of the ring with the right—there was a graceful flow, a magical groove, that made it sometimes seem that the less a discus thrower exerted himself, the farther the saucer flew. “You have to control yourself and put yourself in a relaxed mode,” Babka explained. “It’s just like the backswing in golf; you can’t go back too far and too fast, or you tie yourself up. You go back soft, and instead of full, you take it back three-quarters. The same when you wind up for the discus, you don’t take a full swing back.” Everyone was searching for that groove in Rome, and Oerter was the first to find it. Hal Bateman, the reporter covering the event for Track & Field News, kept his eyes on Oerter as he “walked into the ring, spun around, and let the discus fly. The throw was so effortless that it didn’t look like it could go very far, but it did, and it landed two feet beyond the world record.” Unfortunately for Oerter, that throw came during warm-ups, and did not count.
The discus final dragged on for hours in a slow-motion fashion that required as much mental stamina as physical endurance. Babka, going sixth out of the group, got off a throw of 190 feet 41/4 inches on his first try. Oerter, lacking the smoothness of his warm-up fling, slipped slightly in the ring and could not match Babka, reaching 189 feet 11/4 inches the first time. In the second through fourth rounds, Babka felt the energy drain from his body and failed to surpass his first throw. But no one else could either. “I ran out of gas,” he said later. “And when I realized that, I was just hoping I could hang on.” But like C. K. Yang and Vasily Kuznetsov providing advice to Rafer Johnson before the pole-vault competition in the decathlon, Babka could not resist giving tips to his teammates. “I started talking to Dick and Al about what they were doing wrong—they were in trouble,” Babka recalled. He noticed that Oerter was “dropping his arm too low, so low that when he came around, his parabola was too high because the body was off.” Oerter would say later that he was never more nervous in his life, but on his fifth attempt, he leveled his motion and threw the discus an Olympic record 194 feet 2 inches, clinching gold for a second straight time. Babka finished second, and Cochran came in third, completing the sweep. In the discus and shot put, at least, Otis Chandler could rest assured that the Americans remained invincible. Oerter would go on to win again in 1964 and become known as the greatest discus thrower of all time. Babka receded, unable to beat Oerter in the big matches, but he consoled himself with this thought: “I always tell people I am the best discus coach in the world. I coached gold, silver, and bronze in one Olympics.”
Not far from the discus ring on the Tribuna Tevere side of Stadio Olimpico, the pole-vault competition continued into the darkness of that Wednesday night. There were thirteen men in the final, but the floodlights beamed on one among them, Donald Bragg of the United States. Bragg was the Cassius Clay of track and field, all acting all the time. Like Clay, Bragg came to Rome with one goal in mind: to become a professional. But if Clay’s mission was to turn a boxing gold medal into a lucrative pro boxing career, and to use his acting skills to enhance his imag
e, Bragg could find no parallel path. There was no serious money to be made in pole-vaulting; his goal was to vault his way into acting.
Everyone in the Olympic Village knew the role to which Bragg aspired. Day and night for two weeks, they had heard him beating his chest and bleating the high, curdling yell of Tarzan. Life magazine played along, running a photo essay that depicted him barefoot and bare chested, wearing nothing but a loincloth, stalking the ancient Roman ruins as though he were hunting jungle beasts. Bragg had been pretending he was Tarzan since he was ten years old in Penns Grove, New Jersey, when he tied long ropes from tall oak trees so that he could swing from limb to limb. “His biggest Tarzan problem is his voice, which he feels is too high pitched,” Life reported. “As a student at Villanova, he joined the choir to reduce his register to a lower key. But he still wants more coaching so that when he summons Jane and Boy, his other jungle friends will be suitably impressed.” As part of his voice training in Rome, Bragg sang for his dinner at the village cafeteria—whether anyone wanted to hear him or not—joining the Italian waiters in renditions of “O Sole Mio.”
At a hulking six-three and two hundred pounds, Bragg was if nothing else the last of his kind. After the 1960 Olympics, his event would undergo a transformation with the introduction of fiberglass poles that, with their extraordinary spring and flexibility, completely changed the technique of pole-vaulting, greatly increased the heights that could be reached, and as a result required different skills from the athletes. Bragg was all power and speed, with burly shoulders and arms; in the fiberglass era to come, pole-vaulters would need to be more agile and acrobatic. Bragg’s type would be rendered obsolete. In so many realms, these Rome Olympics represented either the end of something or the start, and here was another small example in track and field.
Records should be appreciated within the context of the times, and usually on the continuum of progress evoked by the Olympic motto—faster, higher, stronger—as athletes improve decade by decade from advances in nutrition, training, technique, and equipment. Few events show a record gap over the years as striking as the pole vault. More than three and a half decades after Rome, the brilliant Sergei Bubka of the Soviet Union would vault higher than 20 feet, but going into 1960 no vaulter had cleared 15 feet at the Olympics. Bob Richards, one of the three correspondents in Rome for CBS, had set the Olympic mark of 14 feet 111/2 inches at Melbourne. By seven-thirty that Wednesday night at Stadio Olimpico, Bragg and his teammate Ron Morris had already broken Richards’s record, each clearing the bar at 15 feet 11/8 inches. Bragg topped it first, and when Morris cleared it as well, Bragg helped him out of the pit. What looked like a gesture of friendly teamwork came with an ulterior motive. “So I’m thinking, Ronnie is a little technician who can sneak out an inch at a time, but if we jump the crossbar up four or five inches, he’ll be vulnerable,” Bragg recalled in an oral interview. After helping Morris out of the pit, Bragg said to him, “Hey, Ronnie, it’s great we just beat the Russians and Germans and everyone; now let’s go for the world record.”
That was too much of a bump-up for Morris, but he did agree to move the bar up to 15 feet 5 inches, a height both of them had achieved previously, though not in Olympic competition. It was too high for Morris; he couldn’t come close on three tries. Bragg nonchalantly rested flat on his back on a bench, using his warm-up jacket as a blanket in the evening chill. When his turn came, he went through his usual routine, loosening his arms on the pole, but nothing seemed routine now. His right leg and knee had been hurting since the Olympic Trials, so sore that he had vaulted only once between July and Rome and had skipped as many heights as possible all day to limit the pounding on his body. But the pressure was getting to Bragg. He felt his career as Tarzan depended on this moment. The crowd expected him to win. When he had missed earlier at a lower height, he heard whistles and boos from the stands. Even his uniform was bothering him. The shirt was made of wool, and his number—No. 431—felt too heavy and drooped when he ran. But as he stood at the end of the runway, he said to himself, “Your leg is bothering you, but what in hell are you saving it for? This is it. Go get the son of a bitch.” And he did. His shirt barely brushed the bar on the way over, but nothing moved. Tarzan Bragg, the gold medal his, bounded from the pit, walked back toward the bench, shook his fist in triumph, cupped his hands over his mouth, and let loose: “Aaayyyaaahhhh! Aaaayyyaahhh!”
ONE MORE day of track and field, except for the marathon, noted Arthur Daley of the New York Times. Black Thursday seemed like a long time ago. In the cold war rivalry of which the American president would not speak, the Soviets were gobbling up medals in gymnastics (twenty-six medals, ten gold), kayaking (four medals, three gold), fencing (seven medals, three gold), shooting (seven medals, two gold), and Greco-Roman wrestling (five medals, three gold), and perhaps their strongest sport, weight lifting, was just getting under way. But most of those sports—even gymnastics in that era—were considered obscure and unimportant in the United States. The U.S. squads had prevailed so far in track and field, basketball, boxing, and swimming, the prototypical American events. “Despite some failures,” Daley wrote, “the United States will emerge from this carnival in rather handsome shape after all.”
At his press conference in Washington that day, Eisenhower had been asked by David Kraslow, a correspondent for Knight Newspapers, how he would define “our national purpose” and whether he thought the American people were losing sight of it. In response, Eisenhower said that he had heard “a lot of talk” about the national purpose recently. “I am not concerned about America losing its sense of purpose,” he added. “We might not be articulate about it, and we may not give daily the kind of thought to it that we should, but I believe America wants to live first in freedom, and the kind of liberty that is guaranteed to us through our founding documents; and secondly, they want to live at peace with all their neighbors, so that we may jointly find a better life for humanity as we go forward. This, to me, is the simple purpose of the United States.”
That night in Moscow, U.S. ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson was buttonholed by Nikita Khrushchev at a diplomatic reception for the United Arab Republic. The Soviet leader was still preoccupied with the U-2 spying incident that had heated up the cold war since early May, when Francis Gary Powers’s spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory. Whose idea was it to send that reconnaissance plane into our airspace? Khrushchev asked Thompson. In the chaotic days after the incident, Eisenhower had asserted publicly that he knew all about the spy plane and that it was his decision, but Khrushchev could not believe it. From the beginning, he had hoped that Eisenhower would say he knew nothing about it and that it was a rogue CIA operation. That would have given both leaders a way to ease the tensions. Now Khrushchev would have to take his case to the United Nations. Wary of the setting that evening, with “the entire diplomatic corps…crowded around us,” Thompson suggested that perhaps that was “not the place nor occasion for a discussion.”
The next morning, Khrushchev summoned Thompson to the Kremlin to continue the conversation in private. After more complaints about the U-2 incident, Khrushchev changed course and said that he wanted to speak “personally, frankly, and confidentially.” Thompson stopped taking notes but committed the conversation to memory. “In explaining why the Soviet Union did not intend war and believed the world would eventually go Communist, and our grandchildren would live under communism, he said this was because the Soviet system was better, and when this was demonstrated even we would adopt it,” Thompson reported in a cable to the State Department. Khrushchev then launched into a “long harangue” about steel production and how the U.S. was producing at only half capacity, a fatal handicap that could never happen in the USSR. And about U.S. agriculture surpluses and what the Soviets could do with such surpluses. And finally, Thompson reported, Khrushchev brought the one-way conversation around to the subject of freedom. “He observed that we often spoke of freedom under our system, but I surely had been able to see the exten
t to which people enjoyed freedom in the Soviet Union. He started to say I was free to go anywhere I liked, but then corrected this to say Moscow and its environs. He exuded confidence, and it was impossible not to be convinced that he genuinely believed what he was saying.”
The show was all prelude, rehearsal for what was to come. Early the next evening, Khrushchev would set sail for the New World and his historic appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
17
THE SOFT LIFE
ONLY three days of competition remained, and the sense of things coming to an end was palpable. As cool autumn weather nestled into the Roman hills, A. J. Liebling described “a childish sadness…Like leaving a school where one has been happy, and knowing that the school will never reopen.” It was in that atmosphere that Avery Brundage, who looked like nothing if not a stern principal, strode into the ballroom of the Grand Hotel at one o’clock on the Thursday afternoon of September 8 as the guest speaker at the first fall meeting of the American Club of Rome.
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