Just as the disqualification was being announced, Wilma Rudolph and the Tennessee State relay team approached the stadium infield in preparation for their gold medal ceremony. For Rudolph, it was a moment of contradictory emotions: jubilation for the Tigerbelles, who would go home to Nashville with six gold medals—one each for Jones, Williams, and Hudson; three for Rudolph—but excruciating pain for her close friend Ray Norton, who would go home with none. When a CBS interviewer assembled the Tigerbelles for an interview, Rudolph seemed subdued. So was A. J. Liebling, who noted that “with few exceptions, the citizens of the short-lived stadium republic mourned for Norton.” The exceptions were the German fans who, as one of their writers noted, “blustered as if they were in Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, or Hamburg, but not in the Italian capital. Waving happily, the German relay team thanked the applauding spectators block after block, while the Americans virtually sneaked back into their booths.”
ALMOST EVERY night since August 31, the Nelson brothers had hosted what they called a celebrity banquet at the downtown YMCA or the Agib Hotel, where most of the two hundred self-described track nuts from the Track & Field News tour group were staying. Guest speakers at the banquets included the colorful Australian coach Percy Cerutty; the Flying Sikh, Milkha Singh; modest Peter Snell, the New Zealander who won the 800; and the boisterous shot-put winner, Bill Nieder. After the relays, with all track events done and accounted for except Saturday’s closing marathon, the Nelsons’ final guests were the U.S. coaches, Larry Snyder and George Eastment, along with Soviet coach Gavriel Korobkov and his assistants. It was a peculiar cold war athletic gathering. Even though the U.S. men’s team clearly had outperformed the Soviets, winning twenty-two medals and nine golds to the Soviets’ thirteen medals and five golds, the Soviet coaches arrived at the banquet like conquerors, and the prevailing interpretation was that the Americans had been disappointing. The disqualification of the men’s relay team because of the handoff to Ray Norton brought back all the trauma of Black Thursday, when both Norton and John Thomas had suffered unexpected losses.
John Lucas, an assistant track coach at the University of Maryland, sat at the head table near Korobkov and later remembered the Soviet coach opening their table conversation by saying, “My friend John, thank you very much.” For what? Lucas asked. “And the Russian coach said, ‘Everything we know about track and field in the Soviet Union, we learned from you people. We were barbaric, but we read all of the American track-and-field books.’” The person Korobkov had learned from most, Payton Jordan, now the track coach at Stanford, was in the audience. They had met for the first time two years earlier at the dual track meet in Moscow, but Korobkov had been studying Jordan’s running techniques since he had written the Russian an advice letter when Jordan was a sprinter at Southern Cal in the 1940s. Now it was Jordan seeking answers from his former pen pal during the question period of the banquet. The Americans had come to Rome with a suitcase full of world records and enormous expectations, Jordan noted. What had happened to change the fortunes of the two teams? “I answered, half-jokingly, ‘We didn’t want any miracles on the eve of the Olympics,’” Korobkov recalled. “So we tried to plan our training so these miracles would occur during the Games themselves.”
After Snyder spoke to the demanding crowd, Korobkov put his hand on the American coach’s shoulder and said, “Take it easy, it’s only a game!”
“Yes, it is just a game,” Snyder responded. “But haven’t the stakes got too high recently?”
18
“SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF THE JOB”
HISTORY is replete with moments that ache with misplaced optimism, and that seemed true of the period of the 1960 Summer Olympics, even as signs of a troubled world riddled those days of late August and early September. The Games were bookended by the Soviet spy trial of American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Khrushchev’s threat to stir up things at the UN, while in between came increasing tension in divided Berlin and violence in the rebellious Congo. Whatever Avery Brundage’s wishes, the Olympics were in no way isolated from the eruptions and disruptions of the modern world. Rome had its share of spies and propagandists looking to turn every situation to their advantage. Yet those days in Rome were infused with a golden hue nonetheless. The shimmering was literal—emanating from the autumnal sun; the ancient coloration of the streets, walls, and piazzas; the warm angles of refracted light—but it was also figurative, an illumining that comes with a moment of historical transition, when one era is dying and another is being born. It was in that glow that India and Pakistan met to determine the gold medal in field hockey on the last Friday afternoon of the Games.
They competed for the world championship thirteen years after Pakistan’s painful birth and three days after an apparent settlement of water rights for the bordering nations in the Indus River Valley, an accord that President Eisenhower cited as “one bright spot” in a troubled world. Perhaps, said the president, this would prefigure a broader rapprochement between predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan, including resolution of the larger territorial dispute over the Kashmir region. How could he foresee a future in which the two nations would be at war five years later and on the brink of nuclear exchange thereafter?
India versus Pakistan on the field hockey pitch in Rome melded the old world with the new. The popularity of the sport in both nations was a remnant of colonialism, a game taught them by “British sahibs long, long ago,” as Robert Daley noted in the Times. But like cricket, the other peculiarly British export, hockey was not thrown off with the yoke of imperialism. After independence, it remained the national game of both India and Pakistan. While relegated to the status of a girls’ prep school enterprise in the United States, field hockey made claim to being the second most popular team sport across the globe—not in terms of spectators or participants, but in the number of countries where it was played, behind only soccer. And at the highest levels, it was a decidedly male and rough sport at that, a ferocious ancestor of its better-known winter relative, ice hockey, played in more of a soccer format. Seventy minutes of nonstop action in two thirty-five minute halves, no timeouts or substitutions, eleven players per side, with shin-scraping sticks, frenetic scrums, and a hard pellet of a ball. Among the sixteen nations that qualified for Olympic competition, none was in the lofty realm of India, which won its previous games by a cumulative score of 24–1, and Pakistan with a 19–1 margin. India was not just the defending champion but a field hockey dynasty that had held onto the gold medal for thirty-two years, since grabbing its first title at Amsterdam in 1928.
It was fitting that Kashmir, the flashpoint in the India-Pakistan political dispute, also held a special place in their national game. In the fertile plains of that region, below the grand Himalaya Mountains, stood large groves of mulberry trees, their wood almost unbreakable and yet malleable, perfect for the shaping of curved field hockey sticks. While most sticks were still manufactured in England then, the wood came from the mulberry trees of Kashmir. Just as much of the territory was claimed by both sides, so too were many of the players. Several members of the Pakistani team had been born in various Indian cities—Bhopal, Delhi, Amritsar, Lucknow—and transmigrated to Pakistan with their families after the political-religious division in 1947. Indeed, one of the most revered players in field hockey annals, Feroze Khan, a center-forward who helped lead India to its historic gold medal in 1928, eventually left for Pakistan, where by 1960 he was a national icon as coach and team selector. There was a similar crossover on the Indian team, with players born in Multan and Bannu in Pakistan.
Anyone interested in field hockey could have found a cheap ticket to the title match, held across town from the Stadio Olimpico on the smaller Velodromo field not far from the Palazzo dello Sport. With Germany eliminated in the quarterfinals and no other major competitions on the national agenda, legions of German fans were motoring north already, clogging the Italian border in retreat, and American tourists who remained in Rome found
other things to do. The considerably fewer Indians and Pakistanis in Rome comprised virtually all of the five thousand spectators who filled about a fourth of the seats in the sparsely populated stadium that Friday afternoon. They made up in spirit what they lacked in numbers, to say nothing of the colorful display of turbans, handlebar mustaches, and gold and purple saris. But even with the small stadium crowd, the game was watched by more people than any field hockey contest in history. It was televised live throughout Europe on Eurovision, and highlights were shown the next day on CBS after the tapes reached New York. The fans living in Delhi and Lahore, Calcutta and Rawalpindi, were the only ones left out. With no live coverage back home on radio or television, crowds gathered outside news offices in the major cities, waiting for word from the Teletype machines.
Each team had an intimate knowledge of the other—the particular skill of individual players, the rhythm and tactics of the eleven—and that familiarity, along with a soggy field, made it a tight defensive game with few scoring opportunities. Eleven minutes into the first half, Ahmad Naseer, on the left wing for Pakistan, displayed perfect control of a swift pass from the right, moved into the scoring circle “with brilliant footwork and speed,” as the correspondent for the Pakistan Times reported, and flicked home a goal. After that, according to the Times of India account, “neither team could do anything except for a few individual demonstrations of expert use of the hockey stick, rapid moves, and superb dribbling.” It was noted that India’s right wing, amid all the cleats and clatter, played barefoot, and that its center-forward, wearing his long hair in a chignon, was remarkable in the way he could stop a fast-moving ball and flip it nonchalantly in front of him as though he were turning a fried egg over easy. In other words, there was no more scoring, and Pakistan won, 1–0, ending the long reign of India.
In Karachi, vast crowds that had been waiting in anxious silence outside the wire offices erupted in exuberant cheers and shouts at the news. Reports of the historic upset provoked an impromptu bhangra in Lahore, with thousands of men dancing to drumbeats in the city streets. There had not been that much excitement, one reporter declared, “since Pakistan defeated Britain in cricket six years earlier.” Homeland pride surged through Pakistani neighborhoods in London, where thousands of émigrés had been able to catch the second half on the BBC. In Rome, A. B. Awan, the Pakistani chief of mission for the Olympic delegation, rushed to the embassy and sent a cable to President Ayub Khan: “On behalf of the hockey team, I report successful completion of the job. Pakistan has won the gold medal.”
Hours later, back at the Olympic Village, members of the hockey squad gathered with the rest of the Pakistani athletes and began dancing to the chant “Ut-Suta-ta! Ut-Suta-ta! Pak-i-stan! Pak-i-stan! Ut-Suta-ta! Ut-Suta-ta! Pak-i-stan! Pak-i-stan!” The essence of Pakistan at this moment had nothing to do with politics, religion, or territory, but only of an overlooked people rejoicing—a variation of “Hip! Hip! Hooray!”—at being the best at something, reminding the world that not everything revolved around the big boys of the United States and the Soviet Union and Europe.
THE EXHILARATION of the Pakistani delegation recharged a global assembly whose crowded energy had diminished late that week as athletes whose events had ended packed up and left the Olympic Village for home. In the U.S. delegation, among the first to depart were the boxers and women swimmers. The men swimmers extended their European tour with competitions around the continent, while the women, led by multiple gold medalist Chris von Saltza and her lucky toy frog, flew directly back to New York. All was not lightness and joy for the “sweethearts” from Santa Clara, California, on their flight west across the Atlantic, even though they had performed better than expected at the Stadio del Nuoto, far outpacing the Australians, Germans, and Brits by winning five gold medals and three silvers out of nine total events. “We get on the plane, and we’re halfway home, and our chaperone says, ‘Oh, well, girls, it’s so nice we are going home now,’” remembered Anne Warner, who earned gold in the relay. Warner and her teammates in fact were not so eager to go home. They wished they had been given the option of continuing the European tour, like the men, especially considering how few competitive swimming opportunities awaited them in the States. It did not help when the chaperone revealed the reason for their return: she had to get home herself, and there was no one else to chaperone them. In the hierarchy of sports of that era, few had less say-so than the bright young women swimmers, so back they went.
The boxers returned at the same time, but far more eagerly, none more purposeful than Cassius Clay. On the flight home, he had written a simple rhyming poem of the sort that later would define his public persona. This one found its way to Afro-American newspapers and was published under the title “How Cassius Took Rome.” It began:
To make America the greatest is my goal
So I beat the Russian, and I beat the Pole.
His goal after alighting on U.S. soil was to make himself the greatest. When Clay arrived at Idlewild Airport in New York, he posed for pictures with his fellow champs, Wilbert McClure and Eddie Crook. The waiting area bustled with fans, photographers, and reporters, including Jim McKay, the studio host for the CBS Olympic coverage, who sensed even then that the young boxer was good copy. Dick Schaap, Newsweek’s sports editor, who had met Clay in Manhattan before the squad left for Rome, joined the welcoming party and squired Clay around town again, taking him to Jack Dempsey’s restaurant for lunch and to Birdland to hear jazz. Wearing his USA jacket, his light-heavyweight gold medal dangling, as always, from his neck, Clay was delightfully full of himself, joking that he had to sleep on his back the night before, “otherwise that gold medal would have cut my chest.” Sashaying down Broadway, he stopped inside an arcade and composed a mock newspaper headline: “Clay Wins Heavyweight Title.” Late that night he held court in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he jabbered away while leafing through a boxing scrapbook. The luxury suite had been provided gratis by William Reynolds, a Louisville businessman, one of many financiers who brightened at the idea of becoming Clay’s professional sponsor.
The following day, on the morning of September 9, Clay arrived in Louisville in the company of Joe Martin, his first boxing mentor, who had started to mold the pugilist Clay when he was twelve and weighed eighty-nine pounds. Martin was a central character in the creation story, which revolved around one image: the old man teaching the young man to box after his bike was stolen. Their flight from New York was met at Standiford Field by family members, city officials, and hundreds of fans. “There’s Gee!” his brother, Randolph Clay, yelped when Cassius appeared in the plane’s doorway. Gee was his family nickname, soon to be overtaken by his other names and lost to history. With an all-white motorcycle police squadron clearing the way for a caravan of twenty-five cars, Clay rolled through his hometown in an open convertible. A fleeting glimpse of him drew gasps and cheers from the downtown crowds when the motorcade crossed Fourth and Broadway on the way to Central High, where a larger welcome awaited the teenage champ, whose success in Rome had transformed him from a failing student into a “conquering hero,” as a local headline now described him.
On the high school steps, Mayor Bruce Hoblitzell, a sixty-three-year-old real estate and insurance man who was known around town as “Mr. Hobby,” declared Clay a credit to the city. “He acts like you would like a young American to act after receiving so much acclaim and so many honors,” the mayor said, slapping the young boxer on the back. Hoblitzell’s border city was considered more advanced on matters of race than many southern towns, yet Clay, because of the color of his skin, could not eat in downtown restaurants or try on clothes in department stores. While he was training for his gold medal, civil rights activists in Louisville had spent 1960 organizing a voter registration campaign aimed at electing officials who would end the Jim Crow segregation. Now, inside the packed auditorium at Central High, after the roaring crowd quieted, principal Atwood Wilson praised Clay as living refutation of any criticism of t
he American way. “When we consider all the efforts that are being made to undermine the prestige of America,” Wilson declared, “we can be grateful we had such a fine ambassador as Cassius to send to Italy.”
In the legend of Muhammad Ali, one of the defining stories holds that shortly after the young man returned to Louisville, he was refused service in a local restaurant because of the color of his skin, and the racist act infuriated him so much that he threw his gold medal into the Ohio River. How could a nation that gloried in his triumph treat him like a second-class citizen? The question is as valid as the story is phony. As several Ali biographers, including Thomas Hauser and David Remnick, later established, he did not throw his gold medal away, but lost it and devised a powerful fable to cover his own carelessness.
Wilma Rudolph and the Tennessee State relay team had joined the early exodus from Italy that Friday morning. Only two years earlier, the status of American track-and-field women was so low that Coach Temple wondered whether U.S. officials would agree to take them along for the groundbreaking dual track meet in Moscow. Now the whole world wanted to see them, especially Wilma. Picking and choosing from fifteen new invitations that came their way in Rome, they expanded a post-Olympics schedule of Athens and London by adding Amsterdam and a tour of Germany, with stops in Cologne, Wuppertal, Frankfurt, and Berlin. Ed Temple left Rome with conflicted feelings: drained of emotion; proud of his Tigerbelles, who had far exceeded expectations; haunted by a sense that they might never be that successful again; and awed by the newfound international charisma of Wilma Rudolph. Could this be the same gangly Skeeter who was so easygoing that they had to wake her to run the 100-meter dash? Not just her performance on the Stadio Olimpico track, but her charm and freshness had people clamoring for encores. German track fans would soon follow her every move, rocking the Tigerbelles’ bus at every stop, chanting a name—Rudolph! Rudolph! Rudolph!—that, they joked, sounded like one of their own.
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