by Wyomia Tyus
* * *
At the end of the summer, in that first year with Mr. Temple, we went to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships in Gary, Indiana. They had the women’s juniors and the seniors all competing at that meet, so the older girls came too. Mr. Temple would only take the younger girls who were doing well. “We only have three station wagons,” he said, “so we’re only going to take the best.”
The station wagons were like the ones they had at my high school: big, long cars with the seat turned backward in the back. Mr. Temple drove one, the assistant coach drove another, and the athletic trainer drove the third. The older girls got to pick and choose where they wanted to sit, but the younger girls had to sit in the back. I was the youngest of all, and I sat with two other young girls in the way back.
I did well in that meet. I didn’t win; I think I got thirds and fourths. But Mr. Temple told me I looked good and told me he thought I could do a lot better by next year. And then he gave me a pair of shoes. “You take these home,” he said, “and you practice.”
Chapter 3.
“Now Run Yourself into a Tigerbelle T-shirt!”
I took my shoes home, I went back to high school, and I practiced—every day. I didn’t just sit around. I tried to do the things that Mr. Temple had told me to do. I didn’t do them to the same extent I had in Tennessee, but then, I didn’t have to: just by being there that one summer, I had gotten much better, and now that I was going to practice too, I was developing into an athlete. And I was happy—I didn’t have to wear those old bulky shoes anymore. I had run myself into some shoes!
Not that everyone was happy. When I came back that first summer, my great aunt said, “Come here!” and started poking my legs. “What is that?”
“Those are muscles,” I said. “All the girls have them.”
“You’re looking like a man! You need to stop all that running. No man likes to see muscles like that on a woman!”
“But this is what it takes to run!”
“That is not pretty at all. And it’s not what women are supposed to look like.”
Thank goodness I had thick skin. People would say these things to me, and when they couldn’t get a rise, they started in on my mom: “You know, she’s never going to get married—or have babies. Because that running just takes the womanhood from you—takes it right out of you.”
Things like that and other things—I cannot tell you how many things were said. And my mom was starting to say, “You know, maybe they’re right.”
“You should just call Mr. Temple,” I told her.
And she did.
“Look,” he said, “that’s just not true. That’s an old wives’ tale. I’ve had girls who got pregnant while they were running and still in school.”
Wilma had a baby out of high school, so she was proof. But my mom didn’t know her, and when somebody’s in your ear all the time, it can really affect your mind. Still, she didn’t make me stop. She couldn’t.
Because after being to Nashville, Griffin seemed all that much smaller. Everything seemed smaller. I had gone through some changes and was starting to see more of the world. Not that everywhere I went looked better than Griffin. When we had gone to Indiana, Mr. Temple said that we should try to see something of the place, but for me, there was nothing there to see. The next summer, though, in ’62, we went to California. That was different. When we got to LA, I decided right then and there that that was where I wanted to live.
But that was down the road; I still had one more year of high school to finish before I could even go back to Tennessee State for the summer. And it was a busy year. The winter before I went back, I managed to run myself into another pair of shoes: Mrs. Marion Perkins was the coach at David T. Howard High School in Atlanta, and she also worked as an assistant coach for Mr. Temple in the summer and would help him scout at meets in the Atlanta area when he couldn’t go. She had recommended me to a sporting goods store in North Hollywood, California, that sometimes gave her girls shoes, and the owner, Clifford Severn, sent me a pair of Adidas three-stripe competition track shoes for free. At the time, my mom was making about fifteen dollars a week and struggling to pay off the debts my father had left when he died, so every little bit helped. Fortunately, the second time I went to the summer program, I didn’t need my school to take up a collection for me because my brother Jackie paid my way. He was still in the army, stationed in Germany, and he had some money to spare. Jimmy Lee was working too, and so was Junior, but the money they made was going into the household.
I ran myself into some more shoes—for track meets only.
* * *
When I got back to Nashville, Wilma was still there, and it became clear not long after I arrived that Mr. Temple wanted her to retire. One Friday afternoon he said, “I want to see McGuire, Tyus, and Rudolph at the track at nine.”
We didn’t usually practice on the weekends, so both Edith and I were thinking, What did we do? The next morning, we went to the track, and he told us he wanted to have a time trial. He wanted Edith, Wilma, and me to run against each other in the 100. And I tell you, I thought, Run against Edith? And Wilma?!!
So we warmed up, and it was just the three of us, him, and the team manager. Nobody else on the track. He didn’t want anyone else to know. We ran a hundred yards, and from start to finish we matched stride for stride; it was the three of us, all steady, the whole way, and to this day I can’t tell you who won. Mr. Temple never said.
He did that for Wilma, to show her what he had been trying to tell her: “These girls are going to beat you.” He wanted us all to retire on top. “Once you’ve reached the top,” he would say, “why are you staying on? Nowhere to go but down.” It wasn’t only about how old she was. It was more that he just knew: “They’re gonna whoop you.” Not long after that, Wilma retired. That was what that meant to her. But for me, keeping up with Wilma and Edith made me think that I was on my way to getting my first Tigerbelle T-shirt.
And I was right. When we went to Los Angeles for the AAU championships in the summer of ’62, Flossie and myself were the only juniors, and the senior girls were Wilma, Vivian, Lorraine, who was from Panama, and Edith. The real thrill for me came when Mr. Temple gave me an opportunity to run the first leg of the senior relay. That was the time when Edith was really coming into her own and winning, and it was great for me to see that and to be a part of it by running with her.
Being in Los Angeles was exciting for all kind of reasons. For one thing, we got to run in the Coliseum where they had held the 1932 Olympics, the year that Babe Didrikson had set four world records at the qualifying AAU championships, and women threw the javelin and ran the hurdles for the first time in Olympic history. Running in that kind of environment just gave you a certain feeling, like you were doing something important. We also went on tours of Beverly Hills, Disneyland, Universal Studios, and the beach—all firsts in my life.
In addition to all that, I won. Mr. Temple had brought just Flossie and me, and he wanted us to try to win the Junior Championship all by ourselves. I won the 50, the 75, and the 100, and Flossie competed in the long jump and the 100. Flossie could really run; on most days she could beat me, but she just didn’t have it in Los Angeles that year. If Flossie had gotten second in either the 100 or the long jump, we would have won the whole Junior Championship with just two girls. As it was, we got second—not quite what Mr. Temple wanted, but not bad.
My dream come true: a scholarship for college!
* * *
That was ’62. In ’63, I graduated high school and went back to the summer program for the third time. I didn’t turn eighteen until the end of August, so I could still run in the Junior Division in June and July. I was winning then too, and for me that was just gravy, because at that point I knew that I was getting a work-aid scholarship and going to Tennessee State in the fall. I was just so happy and proud. Hey, I thought, I can do this! My mom doesn’t have to worry about me—I’m going off to college on my own steam. It wasn�
�t all smooth sailing; we were still in the same boat money-wise, and I didn’t know how some things were going to get done. Going off to college, you needed a trunk, which I didn’t have, and I also didn’t have the clothes to fill it; all my stuff fit into one piece of luggage.
Still, I was looking forward to it, and I was really coming out of my slump. I was talking a lot more—not yet to the point that I should have been, but more.
Then, that summer, I made the US team to go to the Soviet Union and left the country for the first time ever. When you went to the USSR, you got to go to Poland, Germany, and England as well—we left in the middle of July and stayed away until the middle of August—but it was always all about the United States versus the Soviets back then, so most of the fuss was about that leg of the trip.
It was the worst trip ever! First of all, it was the longest I had ever been on a plane. It was also the second time I had ever been on a plane—we had flown to California too, and that was it. We made it fun; we went as a team and played games and cards and talked a whole lot of junk. Of course, we had to wear uniforms on the plane—dresses, but not the full fashion outfits I would have to wear later when I traveled with the Tigerbelles. Still. Dress uniforms? On a ten-hour flight to Russia? Come on. But we did what we had to, and we had little bags with our jeans—our cutoff jeans—and T-shirts in them, and we went in the bathroom and changed for the flight, and then, just before we landed in Russia, we put our uniforms back on.
Except—they wouldn’t let us land. We were supposed to go to Moscow, but when we got there, they had us circling and circling—they actually had to land the plane some place we weren’t supposed to be to get fuel because we had been flying for so long. It was that whole Cold War thing. When we finally landed at something like four in the morning, we were dead tired. But that didn’t change the fact that we were going to be running in the next day or two; they weren’t going to postpone the meet so that we had time to recover.
It wasn’t just the flight that went wrong. That was also the time when Mamie—Flamin’ Mamie of the Bouffant Belles—was the coach of the team.[13] We weren’t happy about it, but there was nothing we could do. It’s not like it is now, when everybody has their individual coach and that coach goes too. Back then, you were stuck with the coach they chose. You still did your own workout, and the team coach would only put in her two cents here and there, but you were supposed to listen to her like she knew something. Naturally, we knew not to do anything Mamie told us to do. We had seen her before at meets with her skintight outfits and her bouffant hair. She would come out to the track—heels this high—and you knew she couldn’t coach. She couldn’t tell us anything besides how to put on eye shadow, tease our hair, and wear skimpy clothing.
Between the plane and Mamie, we did poorly in the USSR—we got third and fourth, Edith and I. It was bad. And then they took us on a tour of the country, and Sports Illustrated shot a picture of us and printed it with the caption, “American girls having big fun, cannot compete against the Russians.” No one said anything about how they made us fly around forever and ever. No one talked about that, but they talked about us, and Mamie was the main one talking, saying we stayed out all night and didn’t come to practice on time. We didn’t do any of that; we were never that type of people. And it wasn’t just about what we would or wouldn’t do; there were rules. If we had missed practice or even been late, there would have been consequences; we probably would have been sent home. So the things she was saying had no relationship to reality. But that didn’t stop her from saying them.
For all those reasons, it wasn’t a great experience, competition-wise. Still, it was exciting to be out of the country for the first time. Everything was so different. Even the smells were something else. That’s something I notice in cities here in the US too, and in the USSR, the smells were both foreign to me and kind of like Gary—industrial smells, like diesel and tar and cement.
The reaction people had to us was totally different. We would leave the hotel to go out to practice, and people would come up to us and rub our skin and ask our interpreters if the color came off. And I would say, “No—this is us. It’s not going to come off.” We had been told they would do that, but nobody believed it before it happened, so it was strange.
Another special thing was being able to go to Lenin’s tomb. At first I thought, What for? It’s just a dead man, but once we had seen it, I knew why it was important to people. I also noticed that, in Russia, the women did a lot of heavy labor. They worked on the streets, and you could see them doing the kinds of things that, at least here in the US, usually only men did. But even while doing that heavy work, they always wore dresses, peasant-looking dresses with lots of layers and colors.
Then there was the food they ate, and how they cooked it, and the whole thing about drinking a lot of vodka; they did do that. And caviar—it was the first time I had ever even seen it, not that I ate it. The food was difficult for me; I was a picky eater no matter where I was, so I didn’t have very much to eat. We had been told by the older Tigerbelles that we needed to carry our own food—canned food, like peaches or Vienna sausages, and Oreo cookies and candy bars—because the food they served in those countries was not going to be anything you were used to. Those canned foods helped me out a lot because, other than that, I really didn’t eat much at all, just bread and butter the whole time I was there—except when we were in Poland. They had this porridge there that was like oatmeal or something, but whatever it was, it was the best. I would get up early every morning just to have it because that would be my staple for the day.
The other thing that I noticed about Poland was that Warsaw, the city where we stayed, was still in ruins from all the bombing that had gone on in World War II. People were living with these bombed-out buildings everywhere. For someone like me, who had never seen anything like that, and being there and listening to how it had happened—I think my eyes must have stayed wide open the whole time. Going on those tours was eye-opening—whatever Sports Illustrated or Flamin’ Mamie had to say about it.
* * *
After that trip, it was time to go to college, which changed my life a lot. For one thing, I started working: I had a work-aid scholarship, and I had to juggle that along with schoolwork and track practice. Mr. Temple tried to make sure we had jobs that didn’t take up all our time and that we didn’t work for people who would object when we had to go out of town for a meet. We had to work two hours a day, so it didn’t take too much out of us. The football players didn’t always show up for their work aid, but we Tigerbelles had to be at work, and we had to do the work, or we would lose our scholarships. Still, I got a full ride, and I didn’t mind it. I worked in the off-campus student housing office, looking out for off-campus students, making sure they had their ID cards and helping them find housing.
Mr. Temple also made sure that we did well in school. You had to go to him every three weeks or so, and before that you had to go to your teachers and get a progress report. That’s how he knew whether we were doing well—or not. The first year, the first quarter of my schooling, I didn’t do well at all. My grades were so bad that Mr. Temple would say, “I just don’t believe you!”
I tried, but I just couldn’t get it—especially the classes that didn’t interest me. I would always go to class, and I was okay in the classes that were more hands-on, like biology and kinesiology, or the ones that were about things I wanted to know, like history, but in some classes the teachers just talked on and on about nothing that seemed important to me. Like literature—I had that class at six o’clock at night, after practice—worst thing in the world. I went to class, but I was just not there. Why would I want to be talking about The Canterbury Tales? First of all, I hadn’t even read half of it even though the older girls would say, “You know, they’re going to talk about this book—you need to start reading.” I would look at that big book and think, We got to read all of this in a quarter? No!
So I did poorly. One day Mr. Temple cal
led me into his office. “You’re not going to stay with these grades, Tyus. You’re going home with that comic book and that apple.”
“Mr. Temple,” I said, “I just don’t know what’s wrong. I go to class.”
“Going to class will not keep you here. What will keep you here is raising your grades. Now you got to get all A’s.”
“But I’m not an A student, Mr. Temple! How am I going to get A’s?” I knew I could be a good B student; I knew that. And his demand was only that all his girls have a C average—he demanded, really, that you have a C+. You could stay with a C, but basically you had to have a C+ so that, if you fell down, you had something to catch you. And here I was, needing all A’s just to get back up to a C.
It was a rude awakening, another one of those moments when I had to start telling myself what to do: I can go to school—I can do this. I got to really learn. Mr. Temple wanted to help, of course, so he made a rule that I had to go to my teachers not just every three weeks but every week, and get them to write down what was I doing, what I was not doing, and what I needed to work on—and then I had to meet with him and talk about it. I did that for the next quarter. Oh God, I hated it. I felt just like a little kid. At one point, I had to go talk with him every day. I worked right next door to him, so it was easy for him to call me in.