Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  The apartment in Westwood was in a very nice building, with a pool and everything—all the things you want when you’re thinking of a place to live in LA—and quite expensive. But there was still racism and all that going on. I can remember getting on the elevator in the evenings after work, and this one man would say, “You’re working late tonight.”

  It seemed like he was saying that to me almost every time I got on the elevator; we must have gotten off work at the same time. “I work late every night,” I would tell him at first, but he just could not get his head around the fact that I lived there, and after a while I would say crazy things. “Mm-hm. That man of mine works me late every night.”

  He would just look at me. He didn’t know what to think. “Well, how much do you charge to clean and such?”

  “You couldn’t pay it. You don’t have the money to pay what I charge.”

  “But you’re always here late.”

  “Yes I am—I’m here all night, believe it or not.” And then I would just get off the elevator.

  You would think it would be different in that area, in a nice place—but it doesn’t matter where you go. And I could never get Art to see all that. He would hear people talking and get completely outraged. But I used to tell him all the time: “It doesn’t matter where you live or how much money you have. They’re not going to change.” For me, it was enough that I could humiliate them and maybe make them feel stupid for talking to me like that. But he would stomp and rage, start yelling, sit down, stand up, keep talking all about it, until I said, “I don’t have time for that. People going to be stupid, people going to be ignorant, and we have a lot of other things that we need to be concerned about.”

  Around that same time, I started working at Bret Harte, and I taught there until I was pregnant with my daughter Simone. After she was born, the question came up again: Where are we going to live and get some acceptance? We were still in the same building, and Art would often be out in the pool swimming with Simone, and one time I was out there with them and somebody from off the street came up to the fence and said, “There’s that n***** in the pool!”

  Art jumped out of the water—he wanted to fight, but I knew he could not. His fighting was always with his words. I was the fighter in that family, and I wasn’t going to be bothered. “See?” I said. “I told you. It doesn’t matter where we live. It’s not going to be any different.”

  We lived there for a while, and then in Mar Vista, until we finally bought a house in Laurel Canyon—just a small house. Nothing like you would typically think of when you think of Laurel Canyon. Things were a bit better there when it came to acceptance, but by that time it was clear we had other problems. For one thing, Simone contracted spinal meningitis when she was three. I was on a trip, and she was visiting with my mother for a few days when she got sick, and they called and said I needed to come home. They didn’t think she was going to live. It was bad.

  She pulled through, but she had a hard road after that. She had to learn to do some things all over again as if she was a newborn. We had to teach her to crawl and then to walk, which took months. And we were constantly with doctors, always with doctors, especially neurologists, and they were never sure how bad it was going to be because spinal meningitis can take effect in so many different ways. Simone was lucky because the only permanent damage she had was hearing loss in one ear. But it took years and a lot of work for her to recover, doing things like taking gymnastics just so she could relearn how to balance.

  Art’s mom was helpful; she knew some of the best doctors in the world—at least it seemed like they were the best to me because they were helping to care for my child. “You need to get this person,” she would say, and she was always looking things up and writing things down and trying to find out who was the best. So we had some great neurologists, and I was thankful for that. But Simone’s illness took a toll on my marriage because I had no time for Art; I was all about my child.

  It was not only that, though; we were just too different. Somehow I could never see our marriage, not even when I was in it. I mean, I knew I cared for him, I knew he cared for me, but there was always going to be a divide no matter where we were or what we did—even if we were only doing simple things. We would go to a movie, and afterward, if he had his way, we would have to go and talk about it. And I would be thinking, Oh gosh, no. Oh no. Another talker. And these were not just any movies, either; they were foreign movies. Art loved foreign movies, and I had to sit there and read those subtitles forever, and I just felt punished. But I did it. It was torture, but it gave me a better understanding and appreciation for a lot of good things that I would never have had time for in any other way. It let me know that I could do “cultured” things, things that would supposedly make me grow to be a better person. And that’s how I started looking at it, kind of like how Mr. Temple would tell us to be when we went on trips. I knew that it was not going to hurt me, that it was going to help me gain knowledge—somehow. Not that I was ever going to use the knowledge I got from reading subtitles. But still. It gave me a flavor for languages, and that was the key.

  Art encouraged me to see it that way. “Wyomia,” he would say, “you need to grow.”

  But I knew all about growing, and I was in charge of my own growth. “You can’t change me,” I would tell him. “I’m still going to be who I was when you met me: a Black girl from a small town in the Deep South.”

  He accepted that, but over time it became clear that the person he cared for and loved so much was also a person he kind of disliked. Because I was someone who spoke my mind, and if he did something that I didn’t like, I didn’t try to clean it up. I would just say it.

  For example, when I was in Mexico in 1968, Art was there too; I was running the race of my life, and he was being thrown in jail for trying to get Puma shoes into Mexico City even though Adidas had signed contracts for exclusive rights. When he got out of jail, he claimed it was Adidas that put him there. “You can’t wear Adidas shoes!” he told me. “How is that going to look once we’re married? I work for Puma, and you run in Adidas!”

  “I don’t care how it’s going to look,” I said. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “I brought you some Puma shoes. You need to wear them in the final for the 100.”

  “I do? Just like that? I’m just supposed to wear them because you said it? And because they . . . I don’t even know who threw you in jail. It really doesn’t matter because I’m here letting you know: I’m not going to wear Puma shoes. I’m going to wear Adidas.”

  “How is it going to look?! What will I say to my boss?”

  “I couldn’t care less about your boss. And evidently you don’t care too much for me. It’s the day before the final for the 100, and you’re busy talking to me about a damn pair of shoes. I could give a . . . I don’t understand. So I suggest you go somewhere else and think about what you have said to me because I don’t think we even need to talk anymore. I’m done.”

  We got past it, but we never really made up. Because years later he would still say, “Someone is going to come up to you and ask, ‘What shoe did you wear in the Olympics?’”

  “And I will say to them, ‘The one that won. The shoe that won. On the woman who won.’ Who’s going to care?”

  Those were the kinds of problems we had; we just had different priorities and ways of looking at the world. And eventually we both understood: This is not going to work.

  “We need to get out of this,” I told him, “before we fully dislike each other. We have a child, and it doesn’t make sense for her to come up under this. You went through that with your parents. I’m not going through that with my kid.”

  His parents—both highly educated people, good people—had divorced early, so he had some experience with that. But I didn’t know anything about divorce. I came from a family where my dad and my mom were always there, and if they did fight or have arguments, guess what? We never heard it. We never knew nothing about it. Lettin
g your children listen to you fight was not what married life was supposed to be. And that’s all I knew.

  So I told him: “I don’t want my child growing up hearing me yelling at you or you yelling at me. I just want her to know that she has two loving parents. And these two loving parents—it’s not that they don’t love her; they’re just not in love with each other anymore. We just have to split.”

  So that’s what we did.

  Chapter 10.

  Making a Way

  I have always felt that athletes should be paid—you could say that was a kind of a life goal of mine—so when I heard about the International Track Association (ITA) paying track athletes to compete against each other, I knew I was going to give it a try. I used to say all the time that if they had professional track, I would come out of retirement, and I had had my kid so it seemed like a good time. I started biking and running—not as much running as I used to, but we lived maybe two miles from the beach, and I used to bike to the beach and back home, and that started getting me in shape.

  When the ITA started, they only had one event for women, which was the 60. Well, I thought, at least you’re going to have an event for women. I was hoping that if I took this opportunity, maybe it could help propel things forward and there would be more events for women and more opportunities for female athletes to get paid for doing what they do best. In the beginning I was hopeful. There were three other women racing, generally, and one alternate, so there were five of us: Barbara Ferrell, Lacey O’Neal, Mable Ferguson, Vilma Charlton, and myself. All five of us ran the 60 because the 60 was all they had.

  From the start, it wasn’t everything I had hoped. We had to travel a lot—from LA to New York to Texas to Tokyo and Montreal—and they paid travel and hotel for the whole team, meaning four of us women and a full roster of men. Because, of course, there was more than one event for the men. They claimed that men and women got the same money, but I never believed it. They paid by the race, and if you placed, they paid more. If you were a woman you always placed, but you just had that one chance to run. So for all kinds of reasons, it wasn’t a lot of money, but at least we got paid.

  When the ITA started, it was mostly indoors because lots of people like indoor track; it’s a closer arena, and you can kind of catch hold of it, really see the athletes. Unfortunately, the league never took off, partly because the whole idea was at odds with the amateur track-and-field associations. And then the ITA officials added another race for women, but it wasn’t what I was hoping for at all: they started hosting events where they had women race against men just so the women could lose—for “entertainment.” To “bring in the crowds.” I guess, at that time, it was considered entertainment—just not the kind of entertainment I liked. But I still thought: If this is going to get athletes paid . . . That was my only reason for participating, and I only raced against the men a few times.

  The first time, we were at a meet in Atlanta and ran 100 yards, the women sprinters against the men sprinters. We had a head start—if I remember correctly, we had ten yards on them—because otherwise we would have been beat right out of the blocks. I already knew that. It would have been different if I had still been running under Mr. Temple. If I had gotten a ten-yard start in my heyday, they would have never caught me. But not at that time. I was in shape, but I was not in shape to beat them. So they won. I also raced against Brian Oldfield, who was a shot putter. We ran 60 yards, and I think I had a two-yard, maybe a five-yard start ahead of him. And he won too.

  Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I didn’t want to have anything to do with that. It didn’t seem to me like something that was going to promote female athletes. First of all, the males were always going to win—always. Maybe if you have not such a great male athlete running against a great female athlete, then that would be a good contest, maybe the photo-finish kind. That’s what they were thinking, I’m guessing. But the way the races were set up, that was never going to be the case. For one thing, there was the fact that someone like Brian Oldfield was never just a shot putter: he also played football, so he had some speed, and he also had that kind of training and competition even after the Olympics.

  Then there was the distance: 60 yards. In 60 yards, I’m really just getting started. It might have been different if they’d had us running other races; over long distances, women have a better chance. But in sprints it’s quite different. The men are always going to beat me in a sprint. I know for a fact that’s going to happen—unless I’m ten and the boy is also ten. I can beat him at ten. I can beat him at twelve. But when you get to be older, unless the male athlete is not that good, or he’s not a sprinter, he’s going to win. I was running the 100 meters in eleven flat, and the men at the time were running it in ten something. If you give me ten yards, all you’re doing is breaking it even. They’re still going to beat me. And where’s the entertainment in that?

  In the beginning, women running against guys was never a part of it, but when the league started having trouble making money, they wanted to do it more and more often. We wouldn’t go for that—I wouldn’t go for that; that was not my cup of tea. But the “entertainment” events weren’t the only problem: I had decided after ’68 that I was done with running, and my experience with the ITA helped me to see that I had made the right decision—despite the fact that in the second year I won every race I entered. I had come out of retirement to see if I could grow and make some money out of it, but as it turned out, it was not a growth experience; it wasn’t even a very good way of making a living, which was and had to be my main concern at the time. I stayed in the league until it shut down, which means I didn’t stay for very long: they couldn’t sign up anybody new after the Montreal Olympics and called it quits in ’76.

  * * *

  The next opportunity I saw to make a way for women in sports was through the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF). The WSF started around the same time as the Women’s Superstars, another sports “entertainment” enterprise that I was involved with in the seventies. For the Superstars, they had different competitions: running, cycling, basketball, bowling, tennis, and an obstacle course, to name a few. The first year, I didn’t complete the competition because that was when Simone got sick, but the second year I was there the whole time. What started out as a game, a fun way to make some money, gave me a way to get to know other women athletes and ended up as a launch pad for something much bigger.

  For Superstars, you could choose seven out of a total of ten events to compete in, but you were not allowed to be in any events related to your specialty. This meant I couldn’t be in any of the running events, which was not fair, I felt, because I was a sprinter; I should have been able to run the longer distances. Those were the rules, though, so I did other things. I was a good bowler—not a 300 bowler, but I could keep a score of 180, 200—so I bowled, and I learned to play tennis, and I even tried cycling. That was a little too strenuous, but I tried it. I tried everything; I just wanted to stay in the mix.

  At the Superstars, you got paid even if you didn’t win; everybody got points, and everybody got money for the points they earned. At least, I know they paid the first five all right, and then the money went down and down and down. You also got some publicity because it was televised. In addition to all that, I just enjoyed it—trying to tackle all those new sports and be good at them, knowing that I couldn’t be good at all of them, but making it my goal to at least finish in the top two or three. I also enjoyed just sitting around with the other women after each event and talking about our issues. Because, of course, at the same time as the Women’s Superstars, they were having the Men’s Superstars, and the men were getting bigger bucks than us. So all that was being talked about the whole time we were there.

  Not that they brought the Superstar women together to have a meeting of the minds; it just happened: one minute we were competing against each other, and the next minute we were talking about what we could do if we worked together. It was Billie Jean King, the tennis player, Mi
cki King, a diver, Donna de Varona, a swimmer, Mary Jo Peppler, a volleyball player, Sheila Young, a speed skater and cyclist, Joan Joyce, a softball player, and myself. There were other women, even early on, but those were the ones I remember talking with at the Superstars. We decided we should do whatever we could to get women more involved in sports and get people to recognize the women who were already in sports.

  At that time, Billie Jean King was getting a lot of publicity, so she was able to say more about that aspect of her professional life than anybody else. She always had the right attitude for bringing people together—no “I’m Billie Jean King, and I need to be over here while you stay over there” type of thing. Very down-to-earth. She never wanted anyone to feel like they were different from her even when she was very well-known. You felt like you were just hanging out. Even now, when I see her or go to a place where she is, she’s always trying to talk to everyone and make them feel comfortable.

  And even though none of us others had ever gotten as much notice as Billie Jean King, we all had experiences, and we all learned from sharing them. That’s what led to the Women’s Sports Foundation: us all sitting around talking about the things that had happened to us, things that had not happened to us, and how we could get things to change. What could we do as women athletes for women athletes? We would have meetings here and there, especially on the West Coast because I think Billie Jean King was living in Palo Alto at the time. The other women knew a lot more people than I ever would, but everybody brought something, and we all agreed: “We need to do something.”

  We started hosting Women’s Sports Foundation dinners, where the core people, those of us who started it, would all be introduced, and companies would pay for tables and for an athlete to come and sit at their table. It just started out very small and then began to grow. I think the first one was here in California, but it didn’t catch on that much until they moved it to New York. Then it was like a snowball that kept rolling and rolling and getting bigger and bigger. The more we spoke up, the more women in general started to talk about it, and soon lots of different women were saying the same thing: “I always wanted to be involved in sports, but there was never an avenue for me. So I gave up.”