by Wyomia Tyus
Mr. Temple had taught us never to look from side to side because if you looked one way, somebody might pass you on the other. Stay relaxed, I thought, stay relaxed! At first it was just: Where’s Edith? Because Edie could beat me! Then I thought: I must be out front! And right after: No, I can’t be out front. And then: That’s the 80 mark; Edie will be here at 90. And then I could hear her coming. I could hear her. We were on a cinder track—it was red clay, actually, and it was packed firm, hard like a table, and I could hear her footsteps. You can hear a lot of things, going around that track. I’ve thought about this a lot because people always ask you, “What were you thinking about during the race?” And you wouldn’t believe all the things that can go through your mind in eleven seconds. That’s what we’re talking about—11.3, 11.4 seconds. I didn’t know at the time, but when I analyze it now, I could tell it was her because I knew she was on my right. I never even thought about those Polish girls.
Another big thing that Mr. Temple always taught us was to lean at the tape; I mean lean, not just dip your head, lean with the whole upper part of your body. Of course I did that—all the Tigerbelles did that. I knew Edith was coming up on me—I felt like she was right there—and then all of a sudden it was over. I couldn’t even tell who won.
Edith and me in the 100 in Tokyo—leaning at the tape! (Photo courtesy of Tennessee State University Athletics.)
I turned around, and Edith ran up to me. “Who won?” I asked her.
“You won!” she said. “You did it!” And she was hugging me and hugging me.
Then one of the high jumpers, one of the pentathlon girls—Pat Winslow, who used to coach Evelyn Ashford—ran out. “Tyus, Tyus! You beat Edie!”
And then all three of us were hugging, and I was wondering: Who got third? We thought maybe it was Marilyn, but as it turned out, one of the Polish runners—Kłobukowska—got third, and Marilyn got fourth.
I was excited. And for me to say I was excited means I was excited. I had to wait a minute before I could go and get my medal, and once I was on that victory stand, I started thinking, I’ve got to do this four years from now. Instead of standing there feeling everything and enjoying my win, I was thinking: I’ve got to try to be here in four years—I’ve got to come back here and do this again. That’s what went through my mind. Not, Yay! I won! I did it! I won a gold medal! That was not even going through my head. It was: Four years? Oh my.
But after the ceremony I started thinking, Who knows where I’ll be in four years. Who knows whether I’ll even be running. It was time to celebrate. Mr. Temple was so proud. “Who would’a thought,” he said. “A little girl from Griffin, Georgia, gone and won herself a gold medal.”
“Yes, Mr. Temple. I’m sure my family is very happy.” I think that’s probably all I said.
Everyone was thrilled that Edith and I had come in first and second. We went back to the barracks, and just being in our room with Edith, Martha, Estelle, Eleanor, and Debbie—all of us about to go back to Tennessee State—was perfect. We sat there and took turns holding our medals and looking at them, and people came around to see the medals and congratulate us. Just to take that in was wonderful. I was excited, even if my excitement never really shows in a bubbly type of way. I can’t get behind that jumping-up-and-down thing. That’s not in me. But I appreciated all the people who came up and said, “Gosh, Tyus, we knew you could do it. You were always good.” Because they used to say all the time that I wouldn’t beat Edie since she was my best friend. They kept saying, “You and Edith are so tight.”
Which was true; we had been friends since I started at Tennessee State, just best of buddies who’d been through everything together, though we never talked about our races. We’d go and compete, and she’d beat me, and I’d take it and keep going. And then in the Olympics, I beat her, and she took it and kept going, and we continued to be friends; the friendship was never in jeopardy. And it wasn’t friendship that kept me from beating Edith; I just wasn’t ready before then. Like Mr. Temple said, “You have to groom. It takes time for you to grow into yourself and feel good about yourself.”
I think I became ready because of all of the experiences that I had in the Olympic Village and out in Tokyo, as well as all the training: having to run so many different times on the relay, trying to get a pass right, someone passing to me, then me passing to someone else, and next time to yet another person—not to mention all those potatoes and all that rice. All of those things made me a stronger person.
Not that Edie wasn’t strong, and plus, she had other things to think about: she had a 200-meter race to run and win. She told Mr. Temple that, and he said, “Well, McGuire, you shouldn’t be saying that.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m going to win that 200.” And she did.
Edie had a lot of pressure on her because the press had put her up as the one who would get three gold medals like Wilma Rudolph, and I stepped in there—I ran in there—and took one. But she never let that get her down. And if she had gone into that 100 like she went into that 200, I might not have won. I don’t know. Either way, it would have been a good battle.
The Gold Dust Twins and Mr. Temple. (Photo courtesy of Tennessee State University Athletics.)
* * *
The 4x100-meter relay was the only other race I ran in the ’64 Olympics. When Mr. Temple finally felt that he had found the group to run it, it was Willye White passing to me, me passing to Marilyn White, and Marilyn White passing to Edith. He thought that combination gave us our best chance to win.
Marilyn was very good off the blocks, but it was her first time at the Olympics; Mr. Temple didn’t want an inexperienced person on the first leg because there’s so much riding on that first-leg person: they have to be able to get out of the blocks and not jump the gun, and Mr. Temple didn’t want Marilyn to get nervous and jump. Willye White, on the other hand, had been to the Olympics before, and I think he felt that with her experience, she would be a good person to run the first leg, and that while she might not really gain anything, she wasn’t going to lose anything, either. “And Tyus,” he said, “you have that long straightaway, and you should be able to put us in the lead.”
When you’re running in the relay, you have a certain zone where you have to make sure that you’ve got the baton, and you can move that zone way back so that you get the baton much earlier. That means that the second-leg person, which was me, would have to run a lot longer, and for the ’64 Olympics, Mr. Temple felt that I was capable of doing that, so we moved the zone back and that’s what I did.
When the gun went off, Willye White, as he predicted, didn’t jump, didn’t lose anything, and didn’t gain anything. She passed the baton to me, and all I could hear was her saying, “Go, Tyus, go Tyus, go!!” And then I was running my butt off until I passed to Marilyn White. By that time, Willye had come up to where I was. “We’re gonna get a gold!” she said.
I agreed with her. “We got away! We’re gonna get a gold!”
Then Marilyn started to run into the curve, and up came Irena Kirszenstein, from Poland, who’s five eleven or six feet, and then all I could see was Marilyn’s little legs moving fast but with these little steps, while Kirszenstein was taking these huge, long, loping strides—taking over until all that lead was gone. Kirszenstein just ate up Marilyn in the curve.
When it came time for Marilyn to pass to Edith, Edith took off and put her hand back for the baton, but it wasn’t there; she had to slow up to get the baton from Marilyn. At that point, we were in fifth place. Edith went from fifth to second, but she couldn’t catch the other girl from Poland. And that was that for the relay.
Willye White and I just looked at each other: No gold for us.
If it had been up to me, it would have been me and Edie—Edie running anchor and me the one passing to her. That way, if we were behind, we had two people to try to make it up. That was my thought. But no one asked me. Fortunately, I would get another chance to run the relay in 1968.
Ch
apter 5.
College As Usual
When we came back from the Games in Tokyo, we flew into New York and from there to Nashville. A bunch of Tennessee State students as well as the president of the university were at the airport to greet us—even the band was out—all cheering and happy that we’d won our medals. The Nashville Tennessean always wrote about the Tigerbelles—they had even hired Mr. Temple part-time to report on us when we were in Tokyo—so they set up things for us to do when we got back, interviews and personal appearances. We stayed in Nashville for about a week, going around with Mr. Temple and meeting the governor and having our pictures taken.
After that, Edith and I took the train back to Atlanta, where they gave us a parade—but only in the Black community. I’m not from Atlanta, so I didn’t think anything about it at the time; when they said they were going to do this, I just thought, Wow—a parade! And even though we didn’t get taken through the downtown area, I still thought it was great for the Black community to be able to see us and know what we had accomplished. My mom and my brothers were there, and I got to sit in a convertible with my mom and Edith’s mom and Edith and wave to the crowds. I felt so proud. My mom never had the opportunity to see me run in person, not ever. She couldn’t go to the Olympics—nobody was sending her, not to Tokyo nor to Mexico City, either—and she never got a chance to come to any of the meets I had in the US because she was always working. So it was wonderful to have her there in the parade to receive some of the honor and recognition.
After the 1964 Olympics, me and Edith with our mothers at a parade in Atlanta. (Photo by Charles Jackson/Atlanta Daily World.)
After the events in Atlanta, my mom, my brothers, and I went back to Griffin, where my high school, Fairmount High, had a social event for people to come and meet me. I had my medals with me, and I put them on for pictures, but mostly I just had them. In Griffin, they gave me a parade through the whole town, including downtown, and that was lovely too.
While all this was happening, however, I was kind of in shock. I was still that little girl who didn’t know very much. Although I had grown in Tokyo, especially in understanding, I was still processing everything I had seen and done. It was great to see that people were so proud of me—they even said, “Can I touch you? Can I touch your medal! I never touched an Olympic medal before!” But I didn’t really know how to respond. It never occurred to me that people would feel that way about me. “They’re all so proud of you, Suster,” my mom would tell me. “All you need to do is be happy.”
“Okay,” I would say, “I am happy, and I’m proud,” and she would have to explain to people, “You know, she just doesn’t say very much.”
Mom and me at the reception in Griffin after the 1964 Olympics.
Probably the thing that thrilled my mom the most was when, on December 1, 1964, I got to have lunch at the White House with Lady Bird Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey; the president himself didn’t make it until after the lunch because he was in a meeting about Vietnam. I still have the card with the menu; it just says The White House at the top, and it lists everything we ate—or at least everything that they served: cream of spinach soup, breast of chicken Georgina, rice pilaf, eggplant Provençale, and Glace Olympic, whatever that was. The menu was signed by both Lady Bird and Mr. Humphrey, and my mom just treasured it.
I was pretty excited myself. I had gone to Washington, DC, as a school patrol, and that was about all I knew about that. But to have lunch at the White House? Who would ever think a little country girl from Griffin, Georgia, would go to the White House? There had never been a thought in my mind that this would happen to me. And to be able to say I had lunch in the White House—how many people can do that? I thought it was the best thing since sweet tea. It was just the medal winners and their coaches—although that was still quite a few people, more than a hundred, if I remember correctly. There were a lot of round tables, and we were in a huge room, and I sat with Edith and Mr. Temple.
We met Lady Bird, but of course I didn’t talke to her. I passed her in line, and we shook hands. That’s how that went. Humphrey said something, and Lady Bird spoke to all of us, but don’t ask what they said. It’s a blur after that. You have to remember that I was nineteen; you know how teenagers are when it comes to paying attention. And I had just won in the Olympics, so on the one hand I was very la-di-da, but on the other I was back to being quiet. It was kind of overwhelming when I really think about it. I was just a little teenager, going to the White House before heading back to school, learning to talk to people, and getting better at reading.
That’s how I felt at the time. Looking back at it now, other things stand out to me. One was that they had never done it before—we were the first. Which seems contradictory: think about all that Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, how important that all seemed in the press, and this was the first time that the medal winners got any recognition from the president? My husband Duane recently found an article about it in “Sports of the Times”[17] where it explains that the lunch was the president’s personal idea and that the White House didn’t pay to get us all there; the US Olympic Committee did, to the tune of $30,000—in 1964. The article also pointed out that in the Soviet Union the government was a lot more appreciative of its athletes, gave them better apartments and TV sets and things like that. The final thing that I noticed about that article was that the only individual athletes they mentioned were men.
But I guess that set me up well for school, because going back to Tennessee State for the winter quarter, I got even less attention; Tennessee State was used to having Olympic champions. They had already had Wilma Rudolph and Ralph Boston, who had won gold in the long jump in 1960 and silver in ’64 and was an honorary Tigerbelle. Not only that, Mr. Temple made sure that no matter how many gold medals you won or how many times you were honored, you knew that you were no better than any of the other Tigerbelles. We were all there for the same thing, everybody striving to do their best, whatever their best was. Not every Tigerbelle was going to win a medal, so Mr. Temple never made any exceptions for those who did; he never treated us any differently. I had to go to practice, be on time, put in the work, just like everybody else. Mr. Temple was still very strict about those things, as well as making sure we stayed on top of our education. His rules applied at all times to every girl on his team.
So when I went back to Tennessee State, it was just college as usual. I was thinking that I had to keep myself in shape for ’68, but mostly I was just doing all the things I enjoyed doing. I tried to do everything I could do in college because I had come from a place where I was never able to be on my own or alone with friends. I was always with my parents, with my family. You hear people say, “I did this when I was sixteen,” or, “I did that when I was eighteen.” For me, nothing much happened until I went to college, so when I got there, I wanted to go to parties and socialize. I may not have talked much in those days, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be alone all the time. Mr. Temple kept a close eye on all of us, and like I said earlier, it wasn’t just him; colleges at that time had curfews for women. If you were a freshman, you had to be in the dorms by nine o’clock on weekdays; on weekends, you could stay out all the way to nine thirty. The latest that you could be out ever was eleven o’clock, and that was only if you were a senior. They even had room checks. And these were not Mr. Temple’s rules; they were the college’s rules. We were, after all, young women in the South.
But if you were like me, you learned that whatever you wanted to do at night, you could do in the daytime as long as you didn’t have a class—which was good learning because otherwise I would have missed out on a lot of experiences. I didn’t know anything about going to bars or parties because that was not a part of my life in high school, so that’s what I wanted to do. We mostly went to clubs near campus—we were not allowed to go to the Grand Ol’ Opry because it wasn’t integrated—but there was plenty of other stuff to do and see in our own community. Just being in Nashville wa
s a big deal for me. I went to town, I went to parties, I went to more parties—I even learned a little bit more about libraries. And I ran.
When I look back, though, I spent most of my time in the dorms, sitting in people’s rooms and playing cards and conversing about everybody and everything. For me, that meant mostly listening and gathering information, taking it all in; I was still in my growth period. Although technically I was a half-sophomore, because I had missed the fall quarter for the Olympics, I was still feeling fresh. Also, in the year leading up to the Games, I hadn’t taken a full course load because I was traveling so much. So in my mind I was just a freshman, happy to be in college and enjoying the things that freshmen do. It was a good time for me—going to class, doing better in school, getting a better hold of who I was, having a boyfriend—just enjoying being me, a college person who was growing on a college campus.
* * *
Mr. Temple was aware that we went out and partied because all his friends knew the Tigerbelles, and he had friends who owned clubs in Nashville. If you did something that he didn’t want all of the Tigerbelles to know, he would call you into his office and talk to you, and if you did something that he wanted to make an example out of, he would talk to you in his office first and then say it all again in front of everybody. “We’re going to present this to the Tigerbelles,” he would say, “and let everybody know that this is something you should never do.”
I had no trouble with that; it was something my father would do. He would say, “I didn’t raise you that way, and you’re not going to act like that,” and I appreciated that kind of guidance. But as I mentioned earlier, even though Mr. Temple was like a surrogate father, I didn’t agree with everything he said or do everything he wanted. For example, I dated a football player throughout my whole time at Tennessee State, even though Mr. Temple didn’t want us to date football players, ever. He felt that the football players took all the scholarships, number one, and number two, half of them didn’t graduate. Not only that, if you ever got famous, he would tell us, they were never going to be able to handle it. They always wanted to think they were better than everybody else. And that, in my mind, was pretty much true. At least to a certain extent, it was true of my boyfriend: he didn’t graduate, and he had trouble with me being the person I am. I traveled a lot, and there were many things said that he didn’t want to hear—some by Mr. Temple, specifically, in the Nashville Tennessean in ’64, when he was writing for them about the Olympics. “Tyus and Hayes holding hands,” he wrote, “looks like this is going to be a fast combination!”