Dear David:
A few minutes ago I had a long-distance telephone call from a British journalist in New York, named Coulter, who said that he had a telephone call from his London office, asking him to investigate a report that a General Grombach had asked some London detective agency to investigate you because you were supporting Red China and Russia in the Olympic Movement. Imagine! Coulter asked me if I knew anything about this and who I thought Grombach was representing. Naturally, I told him it was outrageous.
Grombach (I know him very slightly) is a very officious individual, who made himself extremely obnoxious at the time of the rumpus about Formosa, following our meeting in Munich. He may be employed by the “China Lobby.” He did his best to try to induce me, without success, to help him get the United States agency for the Olympic film. He was in Rome during the Games, writing a column in the English newspaper there…
I don’t know what he is up to, but certainly no good.
Sincerely,
Avery Brundage
Three days later, the story exploded in the British press, first with a banner headline in The People newspaper: “General Orders: Probe Lord Burghley. Americans Spread Vile Witch-Hunt to Britain.”
“For the past three months,” the article by Patrick Kent began, “an American intelligence agency has been conducting a secret, high-powered check-up on one of Britain’s bluest-blooded aristocrats—because they think he may be a Communist.” The story characterized the investigation as “this ridiculous witch-hunt” and said it was instigated by “a mysterious group of suspicious Americans” led by Grombach. “Speaking to General Grombach on the transatlantic phone, I pointed out that Lord Burghley was educated at Eton and Cambridge, was an officer in the Guards, and for twelve years a Conservative MP. Did that sound like a Communist background?” Kent wrote.
“‘Well,’ said General Grombach, ‘there are still many people who wonder why the Marquess is so keen to help Russia and Red China in the Olympics.’”
Kent then called Exeter “at his stately home in Stamford, Lincs [Lincolnshire], where he keeps his own pack of foxhounds” and told him of the spying.
“At first he was flabbergasted—then he roared with laughter. ‘My godfathers! Me a Red! You’d better tell that investigator fellow that I’ve got a radio transmitter under my bed!’”
After handling the press, the marquess dashed off a return note to Brundage. “I have treated it all with ridicule, which seems to have produced the desired result,” he wrote. Then he rid himself of the nuisance altogether by buying out the London detective agency that had been hired to snoop on him.
Grombach, frustrated at every turn, made one last plea with his congressional contacts on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He had been pushing them to investigate Brundage, Exeter, and the IOC for two years, with no luck. This time he urged them to subpoena him to testify, and went so far as to write out in advance what questions he should be asked and how he would answer them. He used a journalist friend, John A. Clements, as an intermediary to slip his material to the staff of subcommittee chairman James O. Eastland of Mississippi. But now Grombach appeared so toxic that even the staunch anticommunists on the subcommittee were wary. “Mr. Grombach’s proffered testimony, which was transmitted to you by John A. Clements of Hearst Newspapers, would have been more timely a year ago” when the subcommittee might have been willing to hear him, staff counsel Jay Sourwine wrote in a memo to Senator Eastland. “Now, having gotten himself into the glare of notoriety through hiring a detective agency to investigate a British peer, he wants an early hearing.” Grombach never got it.
SCHOOL AWAITED many Americans when they got home. John Thomas, back at Boston University, returned to a stuffed mailbag. Most of it was hate mail lambasting him for losing to the Russians. “People still remember that you lost to a Russian,” he said later. “You can win a thousand times, but if you lose once to a Russian, that’s a no-no.” When Anne Warner came back to Menlo-Atherton High for her junior year, the principal took her to lunch, and that was it. Her career was essentially over—the same for most of the young female swimmers who had no college scholarships in their futures. Four years later, Warner fumed when that same principal hailed Dick Roth, a swimmer on the 1964 Tokyo squad, as the school’s first Olympian. “He meant first male athlete,” Warner said later, in those few words evoking years of frustration.
Dave Sime came back from Rome to report for his medical residency at the VA hospital in Durham, North Carolina. The chief resident, Stuart Boganoff, told him, “Oh, you’re the famous runner; well, we have a famous case for you.” There was a patient with a bad case of prostatitis who needed his prostate massaged, Sime was told. He prepared to do as instructed, until he noticed that the other residents “were all laughing so hard they had tears coming from their eyes.” Welcome home, hotshot. Sime remained in great shape, and in the years after Rome occasionally thought about trying a comeback to finally gain the gold medal that had so cruelly eluded him. In 1971, when he was thirty-five, he competed at a meet in Miami and ran a 9.6 100-yard dash—yards, not meters, but still impressive. But he kept his focus on medicine, eventually becoming one of the most respected eye doctors in South Florida. His patients over the years included baseball legend Ted Williams, jockey Eddie Arcaro, Nixon pal Bebe Rebozo, and Eleanor Holm, the champion swimmer. Holm became best known for her most humiliating moment out of the pool, when Avery Brundage kicked her off the 1936 Olympic squad for misbehavior, alleging public drunkenness during the team’s voyage across the Atlantic aboard the SS Manhattan on the way to Berlin. Holm always acknowledged that she had had a few glasses of champagne but claimed that Brundage held a grudge against her. In conversations decades later with Sime, a fellow Olympian, she finally revealed what she believed to be the underlying reason for the grudge. It was not her drinking that upset the publicly upright Brundage, she told her eye doctor, but rather the fact that this unlikely Don Juan had propositioned her, and she had turned him down. Here was just one more reason for Dave Sime to view the Olympic ideal with a healthy dose of skepticism.
What Rafer Johnson most wanted to do after winning his gold medal in Rome, he said, was nothing more than take a walk in the dark and stare up at the moon. Beyond that, he had few plans. He knew he would never compete in the decathlon again. His days as a track-and-field star were done. “That chapter was definitely over,” he said later. “But at that moment, I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next.” Some of the Olympic boxers and basketball players—Cassius Clay, Oscar Robertson, Walt Bellamy, Bob Boozer, Adrian Smith, Jerry Lucas, Jerry West, among others—could keep doing what they were doing and get paid for it in the pros. Some of the track stars, including Ray Norton, Stone Johnson, and Rink Babka, were planning to switch sports and try to make it in the National Football League. Rafer considered that option after being drafted by the Los Angeles Rams, but he had not played football since high school, and being a twenty-eighth-round draft choice did not establish him as much of a prospect.
The favorite son returned to Kingsburg, his hometown up on Freeway 99 in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, to see his mother and siblings and unwind in the hot, dry balm of that embracing place. Kingsburg had followed Johnson’s every move in Rome; the audio of the television coverage even blared on the small town’s public address system. They held a parade in his honor and gave him the keys to the city. With his gold medal finally secured, he felt that he had come full circle since the day his high school coach first took him twenty miles down the valley to Tulare to see Bob Mathias compete in a decathlon. Mathias had inspired him, and now he had surpassed his inspiration, breaking Mathias’s records. Many awards would come Johnson’s way as the best amateur athlete of the year, but a testimony in his hometown newspaper, the Kingsburg Recorder, seemed to move him most.
The community should be proud of Rafer Johnson, not only as an athlete but as an individual. Tobacco-chewing, beer-dri
nking, loud-talking athletes received the plaudits of the crowd so long as they can hit a baseball or run with a football. There are communities proud of being their hometowns. But how proud can they be of the individual as an individual, not just as an athlete?
Quantities of character are at least as important as physical ability, even in this day when standards seem to be no higher than the gutter. When character and ability are combined, you have an unusual individual. They are combined in Rafer Johnson. Writers have come to Kingsburg to try and discover what makes him as he is. They seem baffled. Why it should be unusual to have a young American with high moral standards and outstanding athletic ability is a question. Perhaps fame does something to the head, and to the heart; makes one bigger and the other smaller.
Johnson was a first in many ways. He had made history by setting a world record in the decathlon and by being the first black to captain a U.S. Olympic team and carry the American flag at the Opening Ceremony. Yet in some sense, even as he won deserved praise from his hometown newspaper, he found himself limited by the same positive characteristics the paper enumerated: his athletic prowess, his universal sensibility, and his integrity. He was a good youngster who turned into a better man, a story that does not have the dramatic arc of a tough kid who reformed or a young hero who slipped. His life was certainly not without obstacles. He had to deal with an angry, alcoholic father. Growing up as one of the few black kids in an overwhelmingly white community presented constant challenges, even as Kingsburg encouraged and comforted him. At UCLA, when he was elected student body president, he received a steady stream of hate mail from bigots who were particularly upset by a photograph showing him posing with two white female assistants. But Johnson absorbed these conditions and transcended them. He rejected his father’s anger without turning away from him, understanding that the son had opportunities that the old man never had. He did not grow embittered or disillusioned from his experiences in the white world but instead developed what might now be called a post-racial sensibility in his dealings with people of all races at the same time that he remained proud of who he was.
Was he being manipulated by white officials, who used him as a paragon of athletic virtue and as a powerful answer to charges of American racism? The letter that air force general Lauris Norstad wrote from Rome after the Opening Ceremony, in which he referred to the magnificence of “this colored boy being in the lead,” captured the mixture of awe and cultural condescension with which Johnson was regarded. Yet Rafer himself seemed largely untroubled by the ambiguity. If society was uncertain and contradictory, he was not. His philosophy was simple and consistent, summed up by the title of the autobiography he eventually wrote, The Best That I Can Be. He figured that his best answer to the problems of the world was his own excellence. His personality came without rough edges, without obvious imbalances or obsessions. Perhaps he saw too much, beyond himself.
In later years, Johnson would try acting (among other roles, as a Buffalo Soldier in The Red, White, and Blue), television (reporting from the Tokyo Olympics and doing sports on a local station in Los Angeles, where his colleagues included Tom Brokaw), and various corporate jobs. He became friendly with the Kennedy family and was drawn into their orbit, both as an official for the Special Olympics and as a strong supporter of Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. Not only was he at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night that RFK was assassinated, but he and former NFL lineman Roosevelt Grier wrestled the gun from Sirhan Sirhan’s hand on the hotel’s kitchen floor. Johnson, dazed and depressed, went home that night with the gun still in his coat pocket and only realized days later that he was in possession of the murder weapon, which he then returned to the police. Throughout the years, he maintained a close association with the Olympics. Nearly a quarter century after his brilliant performance in Rome, he was chosen to light the flame at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. He ascended the steps of the Coliseum looking as though he could still go out and win the decathlon one last time.
In Rome, among the athletes, Rafer Johnson was an undisputed leader. No one could match him. He was smart, regal, empathetic, handsome, and superbly skilled. He did not disappear or shrink when the Games ended, nor did he transform himself into something mythic. He remained forever Rafer Johnson, while one of his younger teammates, Cassius Clay, evolved into Muhammad Ali, the best-known athlete on the planet. Who was the superior figure, really, between the two? One could imagine some envy, or even dismay, seeping into Johnson’s soul as he watched the clown prince of Rome become the self-styled king of the world.
But Johnson would not let that happen. He felt close to the young boxer from the first time they met at the Olympic Village in Rome. Months after they had won their gold medals, they toured the South together on a speaking tour of predominantly black colleges. They were roommates on the road and stayed up late at night as Clay told Johnson precisely how he planned to become an unforgettable character as well as the heavyweight champion of the world. Many of the cocky phrases and poems that Clay—and later Ali—brought to the world, he first tried out on Rafer Johnson in their hotel rooms. Johnson saved those discussions for posterity on a small tape recorder. The friendship, for Johnson, was an attraction to an opposite, or a repressed part of self, and he was self-aware enough to appreciate it, saying of Cassius Clay: “I loved the way he talked. He was just brash and challenged people, and he said it the way he felt it, and he talked about it. I am not that type of person. I carry it inside. I talk about it a little bit, but I don’t need to say everything. He seemed to need to say everything. He wanted to talk about the beginning, and how he was going to do it, and the end, how he was going to finish. I just couldn’t do that. That just wasn’t my makeup. But I loved him for being that kind of person. I loved him for that.”
Johnson shook his head in amazement as he reminisced about Clay, as did Tennessee State coach Ed Temple when recalling another incident that occurred shortly after he returned from Rome. He was at home preparing to leave for school one morning when his wife looked out the window and gasped. “Who do you know who drives a pink Cadillac convertible?” she asked. Temple was not sure, nor was he surprised when it turned out to be the brash kid from the boxing team who had such a huge crush on one of his Tigerbelles. “Coach,” Cassius Clay said when he reached the door. “Can you tell me what room Wilma’s in? I came here from Louisville, and I just want to holler at her.”
Coach Temple and the Tigerbelles had arrived home on the Thursday afternoon of September 29, more than two weeks after the closing of the Rome Games. They had toured Europe and stopped in Detroit and Chicago on the way back to the Tennessee State campus, where more than five thousand students and local supporters packed the campus gym to greet them. The next Monday they were guests at the Tennessee state capitol, where they were honored with scrolls and praised by Governor Buford Ellington, the same politician who had campaigned as a segregationist two years earlier while Temple’s women competed for their nation at the first dual track meet in Moscow.
The triumph of Wilma Rudolph temporarily transformed the racial landscape of her home turf, but the change did not come merely because of her grand accomplishments in Rome. It came because she insisted on it. When the Clarksville town fathers announced they wanted to hold a parade and banquet in her honor and proclaim Tuesday, October 4, Wilma Rudolph Day, she said she would attend only if all events were integrated. “So I sort of broke that barrier in my hometown,” she said later. “I probably did everything that I wasn’t supposed to do, but it was to pave the way for other blacks in the town.”
The banquet at the armory marked the first time blacks and whites in Clarksville sat together at racially integrated tables for an official event. Rudolph was joined on the dais by Martha Hudson and Barbara Jones, two of her teammates on the relay team, along with Ralph Boston, the gold medalist long jumper, and Eddie Crook, the army sergeant from nearby Fort Campbell who had won the middleweight title in Rome. Nearby were Mayor W. W. B
arksdale, chamber of commerce president Walton N. Smith, Burt High School principal G. W. Brooks, and Dr. W. S. Davis, president of Tennessee State. Among the more than eleven hundred people in the audience were her parents, Eddie and Blanche Rudolph. On the wall behind the dais was an oversized American flag, and above that a banner that read “Welcome Wilma.” The chamber president gave her a silver tray. The college president called her “the queen of the Olympics.” The high school principal said it was not the prevailing wind but her own determination that carried her to the finish line. The mayor handed her a copy of the Wilma Rudolph Day proclamation extolling her “magnificent victories” and introduced her to a standing ovation. Amid her happiness, Rudolph said, she remained aware of her responsibilities as a champion. “In every effort I have been motivated by one thing: to do justice to those who believe in me and to use my physical talents to the glory of God and the honor of womanhood.”
She did more than justice to both. The same magnetism that prompted her hometown to desegregate for a day drew people of all kinds toward her for the rest of her life. A few months after the banquet, President Kennedy, hearing that she was in Washington to receive an award, called her over to the White House and was so taken by her that he missed his rocking chair as he sat down next to her in the Oval Office, and then talked to her so long that he left his next appointment waiting for an extra half hour. He told her how much he enjoyed watching her run on television and asked her the story of her life.
But it was the last phrase of her banquet speech—the honor of womanhood—that resonated deepest and longest. She was by no means the first great woman Olympian, but a unique combination of personal and cultural forces—her style and attractiveness, her candor and pride in who she was and where she was from, the leg braces of her childhood, the fact that she flashed onto the scene so brilliantly at the first commercially televised Olympics, her international esteem—made her a powerful symbol of the rise of women in sports. If there were a Mount Rushmore of women athletes, her profile would be one of the four chiseled faces. “For every woman athlete who came after, she was the person who opened the door,” Ed Temple said later. “Wilma opened that door, and for all women, not just in track and field. She had that smile. She had that charisma.”
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