by Wyomia Tyus
Most people just wanted to make sure they knew your name so they could say hello when they passed you in the Village, which I thought was cool. A lot of times, especially out on the track, the athletes would be with their coaches, who usually spoke English. That year, Irena Kirszenstein and Ewa Kłobukowska were like the Edith McGuire and Wyomia Tyus of Poland. Their coach kept talking to Mr. Temple about our strides and how he wanted to measure them. “The stride, the stride!” he would say. Edith and I would look at each other and say to ourselves, It’s not that serious, you just run. But the Polish runners knew how long their strides were, and that mattered to them. Coaching was totally different between the two countries in those days.
In the evenings after dinner, we would go to the area where everybody socialized, and some of the athletes could speak multiple languages, and they would talk and translate and play music in the meeting room where everybody congregated. Some groups had their own little tape recorders and would play their music—whatever was popular in the sixties—and other people would come over and sit and listen or get up and bob around. Once the music was on, everybody could converse because everybody could dance—maybe not all in the same way, but they could dance, and there was a lot of that kind of conversing.
Being in the Village and having access to all that diversity was just incredible, and I grew a lot from that experience. Coming from Georgia and Tennessee, not knowing anything but “You’re Black” and “You’re white,” and then seeing all these different hues and colors, all these different ethnicities, there was nothing I could do but grow. It made me have a better understanding of people in general—and of myself. Everybody always talks about the differences between Blacks and whites, but the truth is, certain aspects of the Black and white cultures in the South were pretty much the same: people who came from the farms ate mostly the same, talked mostly the same, dressed mostly the same, depending on their class. But in the Olympic Village, there were all these people who ate different foods and spoke different languages and wore different clothes—they lived differently, and they had a different understanding of how we lived. I had always known these other types of people existed, but before that I had never been around many of them or even tried to have conversations with them. In the Village, that type of thing happened every minute of every day. And it changed me, all that learning about different cultures.
I also got to learn a lot about Japanese culture in particular. The reporters would take us out to dinner, and that was the first time I was exposed to sushi. Mr. Temple would say to me, “Tyus, you know you got to eat here. You can’t just not eat. Don’t be embarrassing us and making these people feel bad because you’re not eating their food.” And I like fish. But, you know, at home we’d catch a fish, we’d clean it, we’d fry it, and then we’d eat it. Still, I told myself, I can do this. I can eat their rice—which I did. Although I still cannot use chopsticks.
I remember one time we went out to dinner with some photographers and reporters who were interested in writing stories about Edith—they were courting her—and the first course that came out was this big fish on a platter with its head still on and its eyes still there and a cherry or something in its mouth. And I thought, We’re supposed to eat that? I don’t think so.
They started taking it off the platter and putting it on our plates, and Mr. Temple said, “Only give her a little.”
Thank goodness I needed to lose weight. But that was the first time I was exposed to anything like that. All the different tastes. Mainly I grew up on fried food, but there you had soy sauce, sushi, and spices that I had never heard of or seen before. It was a good experience. Although I didn’t eat most of the food, it was still eye-opening, and it broadened my horizons, made me more understanding, made me want to try more things.
I also went with other people—I didn’t go on my own—to the dining halls of other countries, just to observe, to walk past, to see what was being served, and that was how I learned about Latin American food. Not that I was eating it—I was exposed to it. I saw it, and that’s a bigger part of the experience than you might imagine. It makes you think about the different countries, which Mr. Temple encouraged us to do. He thought that when you were in a country, you needed to experience it, to try to understand it, because you never knew when you were going to go back there. “If nothing else,” he would say, “go and see it. Lay eyes on it. Then you can say, “I’ve seen this.” Whether you’ve tried it or not. You have a memory.” And that was very important to him, to give us another type of education—not only a college education but also an education of the world.
Of course, this didn’t mean we could just do anything and everything; Mr. Temple was very strict about things that we could do and things we couldn’t; we could not, for example, climb Mount Fuji or do anything else that might put our legs or feet in jeopardy. But there were lots of things we could do. Since the press was courting Edie, they would take us shopping down in the Ginza district, and whenever reporters asked Edith to go somewhere, Mr. Temple would say, “If Edith goes, Tyus goes. She can’t go without Tyus.” He was always that way, whether it was me and Edith or others: he felt that if you were going to be exposed to something, you had to bring people along with you. It’s kind of like the whole shoe thing—when companies offered someone shoes, the athlete did not just get shoes for themselves, but for everyone.
Just getting to the Ginza market was an experience, with all the cars and people and everybody looking at us kind of strange—and we were looking at them kind of strange too. For them, I guess it was because we were the only ones who looked the way we did. And I think I was reacting to the fact that it was so very tight there, in Tokyo, everything so close together; it was kind of shocking, especially for me, coming from a dairy farm where there was space galore.
Once we got downtown, we went into the department stores, and they asked us what we wanted to look for and offered us things like shoes. There were no shoes to fit these big feet of ours. We have pictures of them bringing out shoes for us to try on, and we could only get our toes in. It was funny to be trying on shoes for the public—for the cameras. And the Japanese store workers were extremely accommodating. They really wanted to find us some shoes that we could buy, but it was just not happening.
After we made it past the shoes, we got to discover what the Japanese are known for, like their silk. It was wonderful to be able to touch the silk and see how they made things to order. They kept saying, “We could make you something before you go back to the States!” So different from shopping in America. Of course, we didn’t buy much because, as usual, we didn’t have a lot of money. I had the thirty dollars that had been given to me, and I bought my mom a piece of silk because that, to me, represented part of the Japanese culture. I also bought little things for all the people who had been so good to my family, knickknacks and coasters and ashtrays that said Tokyo or Japan on them—things that didn’t really cost much. This was 1964, so the little things weren’t very expensive; thirty dollars was actually a lot of money when it came to buying trinkets. And when you were being taken around by photographers and journalists, you got a better deal too, for bringing publicity.
Although the press arranged for us to go shopping, it wasn’t as if they were buying us anything. Mr. Temple would never hear of it, and not only that, it would have taken away our amateur status. At that time, you couldn’t accept a gift worth more than fifty dollars. So there wasn’t much actual shopping happening on our shopping trips. We had to stop a lot so that they could stage the pictures, and we always had a lot of people with us, but still, everywhere we went, there was something new for our eyes to see.
Even though they asked us where we wanted to go, they only took us to what they actually wanted us to see. We were sheltered. They didn’t take us to the poorer neighborhoods or tell us what was going on politically and economically in Japan or even in Tokyo. If there was unrest anywhere, we didn’t see it; they showed us the best side of everything. But it was
still a mind-altering experience. The Japanese looked at us strange, but they treated us with respect. Imagine what that felt like to us, coming from Tennessee and Georgia, where we were so used to society not being integrated. As Mr. Temple said, “They treat you better in another country than they do in your own. Someday that will change, but right now that’s the way it is.”
During the Olympics, though, it wasn’t just the Japanese who treated us differently. At that time, the Civil Rights Movement was just getting started, so I had a very particular experience coming from the South. Tennessee State was a totally Black school, and I was from Griffin, Georgia, where Blacks had gone to one school and whites had gone to another. I never went to school with any white kids at all, and I have never had a white teacher in my life—not in elementary, junior high, high school, or college. It was simple: they had their lives, and we had ours. But when we went to the Olympics, we were all on the same plane, and they didn’t make the Black athletes sit in the back—there was no assigned seating, none of that. And once we were on the plane and at altitude, we went into the bathroom and changed into our T-shirts and jeans as usual, and then we would sit and play cards and walk the plane and talk to anybody we wanted. We were like a big family.
In Japan, it was the same kind of thing. We were all in the same barracks; they were not segregated by race, just country and sex. In our dorm at the Village, I roomed with Edith, Estelle Baskerville, Eleanor Montgomery, Martha Watson, and Debbie Thompson—a huge room with all Black women. But that was because Estelle, Eleanor, and Martha were not Tigerbelles at the time; they were coming into Tennessee State for the fall. Mr. Temple had put us all together because he was recruiting Martha and the others, and he wanted them to know: These are going to be your teammates, the Tigerbelles you’re going to work with, and we want you to get a good start. He was all about that. His thinking was to have us all together so that when they came to school, they would know us, and we would be a team already. They could either like us or not, but that would already be broken in by the time they came.
There were other Black women on the team—in addition to being mostly Tigerbelles, the women’s team was predominantly Black—and I don’t know who their roommates were, but some of them had to be white. The field eventers—except Earlene Brown—were white, so there were probably about four or five white women on the team. I knew those white women because we ran together at different meets, though I wasn’t friends with any of them. But even for us, in our all-Black room, it was different from what I was used to because of where the other girls were from: Estelle was from Columbus, Ohio, Eleanor was from Cleveland, and Martha was from Long Beach, California, so all their schools had been integrated. There were lots of people on the team who didn’t come from the South and whose situations were different from mine and the other Tigerbelles.
For me, we were a team, and we were all there together. That’s how I looked at it. I can’t say how the white athletes looked at it because we didn’t talk about race relations—we were playing cards and joking around and trying to make the trip feel as short as possible. I’m thinking about the white athletes who were on the track team. I don’t know if they were racist or if they weren’t. I do know that when we got back to America, they went their way and we went ours, and that was it. But we still had that experience, and it made a difference. It was also different to see the white managers—the managers of the women’s track team were almost never Black—working under Mr. Temple.
For all that was different, however, there were some things that were still the same, like when we had an issue with the men’s coach and the starting blocks. At the Olympics, each team brings its own starting blocks. In 1964, the American runners used Arnett blocks, the men and the women both, no matter where we went. Starting blocks had been shipped to Japan for “the team,” but when we got to Tokyo, the coach of the men’s team refused to let Mr. Temple use them.
“What are you talking about?” Mr. Temple said to him. “I thought we were the American team—that we were all the American team.”
But no. According to the men’s coach, we could not use those blocks, and for a while it looked like we were going to have to use the blocks that were there, the ones the Japanese runners used. We didn’t know anything about their blocks, didn’t know how to set them, weren’t accustomed to starting from them, but somehow the men’s team’s coach thought it would be okay for us to use them—in the Olympics.
Mr. Temple just could not believe it, so he was talking about it, and we were talking about it, and when Bob Hayes heard, he said, “What kind of craziness is this? You can use my blocks any time you want.”
That’s how we ended up using the Arnett blocks: because the male athletes themselves made a point of sharing. Was it a racist thing? I say yes, definitely, but also a sexist thing; the coach was not trying to make the Black male runners use the Japanese blocks. Mr. Temple wrote about this in his biography, Only the Pure in Heart Survive, and he used to speak about it all the time. As far as I know, the men’s coach has never explained himself; he never had to, because nobody would talk to him about it. Mr. Temple definitely didn’t have anything else to say to him.
* * *
All that was going on before we even got to race—all that and more. For example, ’64 was the first time South Africa was banned from the Games. At the time, I wasn’t totally aware of all the political implications that went along with that, but it was not something that you could go to the Olympics and not know. I didn’t have discussions with people on the team about it, but I think that was partly because the only thing that could have been said was that they should have done that years before.
Of course, we didn’t spend all our time shopping at the Ginza or eating foreign food or thinking about how integrated we were or weren’t. A lot of the time we were simply busy preparing for our races. And for me that meant eating lots of rice and bread and potatoes. Because I actually believe that gaining the weight helped me get stronger—although Mr. Temple didn’t think so. He just thought I was too big. But I was growing—I was growing in more ways than one. That’s what I felt, although I never conveyed it to Mr. Temple. And when he said, “I’m going to have to run you some more, we’re going to need some extra practices,” I just said what I always said: “Okay, Mr. Temple.”
Regardless of who was right, it worked out. Between his hard practices—which everyone had to do—and preparing for the relay, I got those extra workouts. For the relay, Mr. Temple couldn’t decide how to configure our team. We had two new people, Willye White and Marilyn White, to add in. He always wanted me to pass to Edie, and that’s how I thought it should have been. But he didn’t want Marilyn White running the second leg because that could be the “longest” leg, nothing but straightaway, depending on how far you move your mark back. He was thinking that, because Marilyn was small in stature, if he had her run that leg, whomever the other teams had could really eat up a lead or, if we didn’t have a lead, get far ahead. So in practice, he kept changing it up.
And it wasn’t just the second leg he couldn’t figure out; he also didn’t know which girl he wanted to put on the first leg, Willye White or Rosie Bonds. He tried several people, and they were always passing to me, so I was always running. I guess that was his way of getting me to run off the weight. Instead, it just made me really strong—good and strong.
When it came down to qualifying for the final in the 100, I was running well in every heat; in fact, I was winning each heat, and easily—easily meaning that I wasn’t struggling or really trying hard to win. Even Mr. Temple had to say, “Tyus, you look so good.”
When I had made it to the finals, he came to talk to me. “Tyus,” he said, “I am very proud of you. A lot of people train all their lives and they don’t ever make an Olympic team. But you’ve made the Olympic team your first time out, and here it is, you’re going to be in the finals.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well—how’re you feeling about it?”
“Okay.”
“Is that all you have to say, Tyus?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well. Okay. I don’t expect you to set the world on fire. I’m just happy you’re in it. Just go out there and be relaxed and do the best you can do.”
I felt that he really wanted me to be me—to be nineteen and not worry. “Okay. Thank you, Mr. Temple.”
He started to walk away, but then he came back and said, “You know, you keep running like you’re running, you could win a medal.”
“Okay. Thank you, Mr. Temple,” I said, but in my head I was thinking, I could win more than just a medal. I could win a gold—maybe. And then I thought: Oh God, I can’t go there. It was like that—a flash—and then back: No way.
* * *
In ’64, the track was perfect. Even with all the rain we’d had, there were never any puddles; the Japanese workers kept it immaculate. Every day, they would fill all the holes, skirt off the water, and make sure it was a perfectly dry, perfectly flat surface. When we lined up for the 100, Marilyn White was in lane eight, Edie was in lane seven, and I was in lane six. The two Polish women, Halina Górecka and Ewa Kłobukowska, were in lanes one and two, and then there were Marilyn Black from Australia, Miguelina Cobián from Cuba, and Dorothy Hyman from Great Britain.
When the gun went off, I just remember running, not thinking, until I was at the 80-meter mark, and then asking myself: Where’s Edith? Because Edith was always catching me at 80 meters. Where is she? I wondered. I can’t hear her. I can’t see her. But it don’t mean anything because she’ll be here.