by Wyomia Tyus
I knew she was right. But I would never say anything. Even though I disagreed with a lot of things going on around me—like them trying to not let me go to that track meet or not ride in a car with boys—the most I would say was, “Well, okay.”
My mom wanted me to get out of my slump and start to see opportunity in the world. She wanted more for me—just like my dad had. I didn’t know it then, but when I look back at it, I think the reason she let me go to Mr. Temple’s program was that she recognized that I needed some help—to be around other girls, ones who were like me, who were my age and who enjoyed running and had some sense of themselves in the world. There was no way I was going to go and see a therapist or anything like that. That was never something that we talked about or would have thought of or could have paid for. But she knew I needed a change. So she agreed to let me go.
And then my biggest worry was, How am I going to go? She said I could go, but I can’t—we don’t have the money. We can’t buy a train ticket. I can’t go.
Fortunately, people at my school, Fairmount High, raised money for me to go. Coach Kimbrough might have been the one who organized it, but other people helped as well; everybody knew that we didn’t have the money. When it was nearly time for me to leave, Coach Kimbrough handed me an envelope with some writing on it: To Wyomia Tyus, to aid her in her trip to Tennessee. And then there was a list of people and groups that had chipped in: three dollars came from Room 8-B, which was my homeroom, three from the Bogarzons, which was a social club for boys, as well as three from the Bogarzettes, which was the same club for girls. The student council pitched in five dollars, I got six from the school ice cream fund, and there was another three from Coach Kimbrough herself, for a total of twenty-three dollars. I’m sure people thought that it was for spending money so that I wouldn’t just be up there and not have anything, but it was much more basic than that: they paid for my train ticket, which was about ten bucks, fifteen bucks—whatever it was, we didn’t have it, and we were grateful for the help.
School support for my first trip to Mr. Temple’s track camp.
When it was time to go, my uncle John Henry drove me to the train station in Atlanta, forty miles away, and Junior and Jimmy Lee and my mom came along to say goodbye. The trip seemed to take forever. I was anxious; it all seemed difficult and complicated: to get to Atlanta, find the right track, get on the right train. I had never traveled alone anywhere before. The train station was huge, but there was only so much for “coloreds”—only so many areas that you could go to and only so many cars you could ride in.
I was fifteen when I made that trip—all by myself with my little brown paper bag of food—fried chicken and an apple and whatever else my mom put in there so I wouldn’t be hungry on the train. Because it was a long ride. We had to go through the Smoky Mountains, and with all the stops we made, it was probably about seven or eight hours.
The Fort Valley meet was the first time I had left Griffin without my parents, Tuskegee was the second, and this was the third. I don’t have a good memory of the train ride. Miss Jessie Lee had said to me, “Now, you get on that train, and you don’t talk to nobody, and you just sit there, and you sit there with confidence.” Not talking to anyone was easy for me because, being me, I was not going to talk to anybody anyway. I didn’t know the other people on the train, and if I had known them, I wouldn’t have had much to say to them. So I sat there, like she said, with confidence.
It was summer and it was hot, and I’m not sure what I was wearing, but it was probably pedal pushers and tennis shoes—Keds—and a little blouse. I had long hair then, pressed and pulled back in a ponytail. My dad had never allowed me to have straight hair, and my mom was happy not to have to braid it.
When I got off the train, Mr. Temple was there. “Hi, Tyus!” He called everybody by their last name, except Edith; she was sometimes called Edith because her last name is McGuire, and Mr. Temple had a stutter—you would never know—and the Mc in McGuire sometimes tripped him up.
In any case, there he was, like he said he would be. Right there waiting for me. “Hi, Mr. Temple,” I said.
Wilma Rudolph was with him, though I didn’t know who she was. This was in ’61, so she had already won her three gold medals, but I didn’t know anything about that either. Her first Olympics was in ’56, and she was there again in 1960, but the Olympics were not something that we paid attention to back home in Griffin.
Mr. Temple introduced me to Wilma. “This is Rudolph,” he said.
“Oh, Tyus!” she said. “Come on!” And she just started talking and talking. Wilma Rudolph—if you ever met her, you’d know—was one of those people who never knew a stranger; no one was a stranger to her. She was that outgoing.
We got my luggage and went to the car, and Mr. Temple and Wilma talked the whole time. I just sat in the back listening, thinking, God, they can talk. I didn’t know people could talk so much, not even my mom talked that much. But Wilma and Mr. Temple could just talk, and I cannot tell you what they were talking about. I was too busy looking around, trying to see where I was and what I had gotten myself into.
We came up on campus—the train station is about ten minutes from Tennessee State—and drove into the “horseshoe,” a half-circular lane with the girls’ dorms on one side and school buildings on the other. Mr. Temple was telling me what each building was, pointing out the track, explaining everything. We went around the horseshoe to the dorm where I’d be living. “You’re going to have roommates,” he said then.
I don’t know how this is going to work, I thought.
“You’ll be okay, Tyus,” Wilma said, like she knew what I was thinking. “We’ll take care of you. The older girls are on one wing of the dorm, and the younger girls are on the other, and you’ll be okay. We’re all going to have a great time.” That was just how she was.
The other girls had been in Nashville for at least a day; I was one of the last ones to get there, or at least the last one that day. My roommates were Gloria, who I had seen run at Fort Valley, and Flossie, and of course I got top bunk because I was the last one to arrive. Flossie was from Mississippi, a really tall woman, five eleven at least, and I kept thinking, I’ve never seen a girl my age so tall. I’m five seven and a half, but there that was short because first you had Wilma, who’s six feet, and then you had Flossie (who had big feet). Both she and Gloria were really nice and very friendly, and Gloria and I got to be close friends. Gloria could run.
We sat for a while and got introduced, but we didn’t stay up late because Mr. Temple had told us, “You need to go up to your room and get a good night’s sleep. You’ve got to be at practice at five in the morning.”
Five in the morning?! But we got right into it because that’s why we were there. “You don’t have to worry about getting up,” he had told us. “The older girls or the manager—they’ll make sure you’re up.”
He had our “uniforms” ready for us: gray sweats and T-shirts and a pair of shorts. We didn’t have Tigerbelle T-shirts because we weren’t Tigerbelles yet. You couldn’t just have that; you had to earn it. We just had plain old white T-shirts to work out in, and that was it.
You had to have your own shoes, and at that time running shoes were horrible. There were Adidas, Wilson, and Spalding—the Spalding spikes, they called them—and they were heavy, heavy shoes. They had spikes, but not the detachable ones; they were old school. Nothing like what they wear now. For years, Adidas used to make their shoes out of kangaroo leather, and then they had to ban that because they were killing too many kangaroos. Those shoes fit like a glove, but I wasn’t about to get shoes like that at that point in time; those were the kind of shoes you might get if you qualified for an international meet.
Mr. Temple had a system, though. When Adidas was giving shoes to a Tigerbelle who, for example, made the 1960 Olympic team, that person wore five different sizes of shoe, according to Mr. Temple’s order. That way everybody could get shoes when they were ready for them. He had stockpiles
of shoes in all different sizes and levels of quality, so when girls just didn’t have shoes, they could get some that were pretty good; or, when he felt that you’d done so well that you deserved some new shoes, you’d go in there and get a pair that was a step up from what you had. Which was good because most of us couldn’t afford to buy shoes, and the school was not buying them for us—and definitely not for me.
What I had were some old Spalding shoes, and I couldn’t wait to get a pair of new shoes—not top-of-the-line shoes, but an upgrade from what I had—and not just because I wanted nice shoes, either, but because when Mr. Temple said, “Well, you’re running well, and we’re going to give you a pair of shoes”—you couldn’t beat that. You knew then that he saw something in you.
For me, that didn’t happen right away. At the beginning, I didn’t think it would ever happen. Practice was just hard. He loved to make you run hills because he felt it built a lot of strength and endurance, so at five o’clock in the morning we were on dirt paths running hills: up the hill and down the hill, up the hill and down the hill. We used to call it “Mr. Hill.” It was not that it was very steep; it was that you had to run it so many times. Then it became very steep, and when you started to get tired, Mr. Temple would yell, “Get those knees up! Get those knees up!”
After we were done running hills, he would let us go to breakfast—whatever the cafeteria on campus had to eat—and lie down or maybe play some cards if you were feeling really energetic. That was about all you could do after five o’clock practice.
We would go back at nine. Nine o’clock practice was mainly working on technique—drill after drill after drill on how to run, how to use your arms, high knee drills, repetitive stuff. It was not about distance; we’d run fifty yards, maybe, lifting our knees, working on our arms. He taught us to think that you were pretty much shaking hands when you were running: reaching out, pulling back, reaching out, pulling back, keeping a bent elbow and not clenching your fists. Some people ran with straight hands and some with their hands cupped. “Think of holding an egg,” he would say.
When nine o’clock practice was over, you would go to lunch and then come back at one. One o’clock practice was all about specialties: if you were a sprinter you’d work on starts, if you were a jumper you’d work on jumping. The length of each practice depended on Mr. Temple, but the five o’clock practice was usually the longest. He had a routine, and if the practices weren’t always the same, the times were: five, nine, and one.
The older girls didn’t usually come to the five o’clock practice, but if they came to the nine or one o’clock practices, they helped out. They were already in college, so they were either in summer school, or they had jobs, or both. Most Tigerbelles went to summer school because it was difficult to take a full load and compete at the same time. Even in summer school, you couldn’t take a full load because that’s when most of the competitions were held. Many people take four years to finish college, but for most runners it took five—and it would have taken me five even if I wasn’t running.
So while we younger girls were just there to run, the older girls had other things to do, though they still had to come to at least one practice, and if they weren’t doing that well, they had to come to two, usually the nine and the one. They had been in the summer program years before, so they had already been through what we were going through. Because of this, Mr. Temple arranged it so that there were always older girls there to support the younger girls and so that the younger girls got to be in contact with all the older girls instead of just a few. He knew that not everyone would connect in the same way, and he wanted each of us to be able to find someone we liked and could look up to who would help us.
There were about twenty girls in the summer program, three girls per room, and we had a whole wing of one dormitory. Living with those twenty girls, you got to know them pretty well because you didn’t have anything else to do. You could go downtown with one of the older girls—usually two of them would take you, and if you had money, you could buy things, or you could go to a movie, but that was it. We were too tired to do much, anyway.
I was still the one who never talked, so I would just sit in the room and listen to the others. Their experiences were totally different than mine, and that gave me something to think about. I still didn’t know where I was going or what I wanted to do or if this—running—was the thing for me. I just knew that it had gotten me out of Griffin. Listening to the other girls talk gave me ideas, and I think that was exactly the kind of exposure my mother had been hoping I would get.
Of course, one of the things that people would talk about was how hard the practices were. The older girls would say, “Now, it’s not that bad. You’re going to get through it. It gets easier.” We would roll our eyes and think they were crazy. At one point, it got to be so hard that I just wanted to go home. It wasn’t only me: one girl went home the first week, and more the week after. When girls started to go home, I thought, I’m calling my mama! Because everybody called their parents, everybody was talking about leaving, about how hard it was, about not wanting to take it. You’re talking about girls who are fifteen, sixteen years old. They felt they could be doing something else. Not me—I knew I would have nothing to do if I went back to Griffin.
But still. And it wasn’t only the practices; by the second week, we were in time trials, and Mr. Temple would shoot film of us, and at the end of the week he would hold meetings and put on the films. He’d stand there in front of the group and point and say, “Look at you! Look at your arms! That is not what you should be doing.”
All the girls would be at those meetings, not just the younger ones. The older girls had to be there so they would know exactly what Mr. Temple wanted them to work on with us. One way they would help out at the track was by running beside you on the drills and showing you the correct form: Stay relaxed, keep your knees high, don’t clench—all the things that Mr. Temple had said, but in a different voice. They could also tell when someone was getting frustrated and needed encouragement, and they were there to give us that as well. I don’t know how Mr. Temple knew that we needed them, but he did.
Watching myself on film—I had never thought I looked like that, running. You’d look at it, and for the most part you couldn’t really think anything because Mr. Temple was busy pointing out all the wrong and saying, “We can correct this.” And then you would look again, and you would see yourself getting beat. That was deflating. More than anything, it was getting beat and watching myself get beat that wore me down.
My biggest problem was that I was never relaxed enough. Mr. Temple started calling me “The Mechanical Man.” I wanted to say, It’s because you changed me! You said to run this way! But I didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t relax. Between that and getting beat, all I could think was, I gotta go home. I have had enough disappointments and enough bad things. This is not going to work for me.
I called my mom after the second week. I had to go to the pay phone in the dorm and call collect. You had to put a dime in so that you could call the operator and tell her that you wanted to make a collect call, and then you would get your dime back, whether they accepted or not. I got my mom right away; I knew when to find her at home.
At first she was saying, “Oh, I’m so glad you called! We were worried about you.” Because I couldn’t call every week; you had to pick and choose your time. Mr. Temple had me call her when I got there so she would know I was safe, and I used his phone in the post office where he worked for that call. But I hadn’t talked to her since then.
As soon as she stopped talking, I said, “I’m ready to come home. This is not working for me. It’s a whole lot of work, and I just don’t think I’m getting any better. I think I’m getting worse. I’d prefer being at home.”
She listened. Then she said, “Well. You can’t come home. Because you decided you wanted to go, that it was something you wanted to do. You don’t have to go back next year, but you’ve got to finish this out.”
&
nbsp; “But you just don’t know!” I said.
And she didn’t care. Her thing was that my coming home was just not going to happen.
I wasn’t angry at her. It was more like, Why don’t she just let me come home? She knows I’m not a whiner, some crybaby type. She knows it must be hard. But nothing had ever really been that hard for me before, so my mom probably thought, She needs this test. She needs to be able to do this. She’s never been a person who gives up.
I’m assuming this. We never talked about it because my mom and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. But I think she knew me a lot better than I thought she did at the time. Because for her to say what she did tells me that she saw something in me that I didn’t see. She knew something about me and my courage, about what she and my dad had taught me, and she knew I could finish the program.
I’m glad she did what she did because I not only finished, I got better, and her saying I couldn’t leave made a big difference. She made me stay, and since I knew I had to stay, I also had to tell myself, I can get over this. I can do the next two weeks. Then I’ll be done. My attitude just turned.
I also knew that, if I had to stay, I did not want Mr. Temple talking about me, ever—or, if he talked about me, I wanted it to be good stuff. I didn’t want it to be The Mechanical Man and, “Tyus, you need to relax.”
I can remember Vivian, one of the older girls, saying to me, “Tyus, if you relax, you can do this. You got it. You got it. You’re just too wanting it to be perfect. It’s not perfect. Run. Just run.”
And I started doing it. I started thinking, Okay, if I can get this over with, I never have to come back here again. And that’s what got me through. After I got off the phone with my mother, I never talked about leaving again. I just kind of let go. I let go of feeling sorry for myself because I was getting beaten. I even started to let go of the fire and my depression over my dad’s death. Because my grief over my father—that still had not left me. It was always there. At first, I didn’t even want to remember the good times I’d had with him because all I could think was that I would never have them again. Of course I didn’t talk to anybody about it. I wasn’t ready for that. Matter of fact, I have just now gotten to the point where I can talk about it and feel okay. So no one else knew; it was just me and my battle.