by Wyomia Tyus
So they got to learn, and I got to see it. For me, teaching young people, showing them things they’d never seen, was wonderful. It was their moment of discovery, and I was there with them. My discovery had been totally different; it came through track and through travel, but I guess they were traveling too, in a nature kind of way. There is so much to learn in nature; it’s like a journey all by itself. And like I said, it brought me back to my own childhood, and how my dad would tell us that you had to step out and see what was there, what you could find in the woods if you looked.
The team building and trust building—getting them to look out for each other—was also meaningful to me. I had to help them to understand that just because you were raised a certain way doesn’t mean your feelings are any different from anyone else’s. People get hurt by the things you say and how you look at them just like you do. We taught the kids that no one has any cooties. Because they could understand that. And it’s amazing what you can do in a couple of days. You can see that kids—no matter what they’ve been told—can figure out how to work as a team if they’re in an environment where they’re all pretty much treated equal and going through a process together. Of course, there are going to be kids who know a lot more, and some of them will make fun of the kids who don’t—like that kid who thinks that a snake can eat them. “Why would you think that?” the know-it-all kids would say. “That’s stupid.”
So I had to teach them that no one is stupid; some people just come from limited experience. “Think about what you just said,” I would tell them, “about how hurtful it is to call someone that. And think about how you know the things you know. Maybe it’s because someone helped you. And now we are going on a hike, and let’s say you’re falling off a cliff, and that person you made fun of is the only person who can save you. So you need to think in terms of who has helped you and who’s going to have to help you and who you’re going to have to help.”
That was my teaching, and I don’t know if everybody taught that way, but as it turned out, it was something I was perfectly prepared to do, first by my father and then by Mr. Temple and the Tigerbelles.
* * *
It was while I was at Clear Creek that I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: if you try, if you stay open to growth and keep looking for ways to grow, you end up where you’re supposed to be, and you get the recognition you deserve—maybe not all that you deserve, but enough. That was made clear to me while I was working as a naturalist, and even clearer when some folks in Griffin decided to build me a park.
When I first heard about it, I thought, Yeah, right. Griffin is going to name a park after me? The people who live in Griffin? Please. And then they started contacting me, but not in a way that made me think I should take them seriously. I know the business, and if you’re going to honor somebody, there are t’s that you have to cross and i’s that you have to dot. You should be calling that person on a monthly basis and making sure they’re available for certain dates and prepared to do certain things. That wasn’t happening, and at first it made me think that nothing was happening. But then I remembered: I’m from Griffin. They do things their own way. And they sure did. Because while they were not checking in with me to make sure I was available, they thought nothing of knocking on my mom’s door and talking to her like she was still in charge of me. And then she turned around and said, “They want to do this for you. Don’t you want them to do it?”
“Hmm,” I said. “Who’s they?”
And as it started to come closer to actually happening, they finally did call to ask me who I wanted to invite.
“Well, Mr. Temple will have to be there!” I said. I didn’t know who else to ask. I told Evelyn, Cynthia, and Cantrell, who are all Tigerbelles, as well as Gloria, who ran with me that first year in the summer program. Edith was going to be out of the country and she didn’t know if she’d be back in time.
Maybe they kept me out of the loop for a reason. I’m not sure. Maybe they wanted to surprise me—show me what they were willing to do for me without any help from me. But at that point, all I could think was, They just need to hurry up and do this. Why does it have to be such a big deal? I thought it would just be a little park because I know Griffin, and I figured it would be in the Black neighborhood, which would mean there wasn’t much space for it.
After a while, though, I started to get the feeling something more was going on. “Well, you know, sis,” my brother Junior kept saying, “they’re going to give you a pretty big park.”
“Did you see where it is?” my brother Jackie asked me.
“No. Where is it?” And when they said where it was going to be, all I could say was, “Really?!”
When the time came, I went to Griffin—all of us went, my whole family, Duane and Tyus, Simone and her husband Nyaniso and their son Damani; they lived in Atlanta at the time, so they didn’t have that far to travel. I was still partly thinking: It’s not like I’m just going for this park thing, whatever that is. I always go back home anyway in the summer.
But on the day of the dedication, I was totally floored. I didn’t know it was going to be that big. I was just in shock. We drove out there, and when I saw it for the first time, it was like, “Okay!”
First, they had this white fence leading up to the entrance, and then, when we got to the entrance, we saw this huge brick wall, and on one side it says, Wyomia Tyus Olympic Park, and on the other side, going the other way, it says the same thing. Then we went in, and they did a whole torch-run ceremony and passed the torch to me. It was clear that they had put a lot of time and energy into making it happen. I was speechless, to tell you the truth. I was shocked and pleased and didn’t know that people cared so much. It was great.
The entrance to my namesake park—164 acres in Griffin, GA. (Photo by Duane Tillman.)
Everyone I had invited came, as well as a bunch of people I didn’t think to invite. Edie was there; she and her husband had gone to Africa, and she had just gotten back and told them not to tell me she was coming. Then there were some other good friends of mine who went to Tennessee State, seven or eight people from school, and whether they ran track or not, they were there.
After the dedication, I spoke with some of the people who were instrumental in making it happen. Bill Beck, who has passed on now, was the first person to talk about it with me and my mom, but he was ill at the time and couldn’t be there. Martha McDaniel was there, though, and held the ribbon while my mom cut it. I was so overwhelmed that day that I can’t remember all their names. At one point, one of the people from Parks and Recreation came up to me and said, “You know, we really didn’t do very much for you when you came back from the Olympics, and this is to show you how much we appreciate what you did.”
Ribbon cutting at the grand opening of the park. (Photo by Duane Tillman.)
And I thought, What?! White people talking to me like that? Because that is something to be said, when you think about it. To confess, “We know that we did not honor you properly,” is a big thing in and of itself. But then to actually do something about it, to be able to say, “We hope that this does it. We hope this makes you feel appreciated.” That is something else again. And I did feel appreciated. It was totally over the top and way beyond. We’re talking 164 acres of park with soccer fields and baseball fields—they’re even getting ready to put in an Olympic-sized pool. And they have hiking trails and a pond that you can fish out of with some swans on it and a fountain, and you can have picnics there. And now, whenever people go to Griffin, they tell me, “I was at your park!”
It’s just amazing. Oh my goodness. I never, ever thought a day in my life that something like that could happen. I still can’t find the right words to express my true feelings. It’s such an honor. One of the best honors I have ever received. And they did it. My little town of Griffin, Georgia. It seems there were people there who supported me the whole time. And I guess I knew that, but you still don’t put it all together—until someone builds you a par
k.
Having a happy time at the Wyomia Tyus Olympic Park opening: Mr. and Mrs. Temple with me and my husband Duane.
Chapter 12.
Mr. Temple’s Legacy
A statue in honor of Mr. Temple on the greenway next to First Tennessee Park in Nashville, TN. (Photo by Duane Tillman.)
Edward Stanley Temple
September 20, 1927–September 22, 2016
When I think about what made the Tigerbelles successful, I think about the relationships that Mr. Temple encouraged us to build. For starters, you have the tried-and-true friendships like the one I have with Edith. We developed a special bond from the beginning, and I am very thankful and grateful to have had her as my teammate, my friend, my sister. You name it, and she’s there at the top of my list.
Some people just can’t believe that Edith and I have been such good friends—we talk on the phone almost every day—for close to sixty years. They think it’s a big deal that we stayed friends after I won the gold in the 100 in the ’64 Olympics—a medal that everyone expected her to win. But I think they misunderstand what it means to be on a team and have teammates. We both knew why we were there. Whether you’re a champion or not, if you’re in a race, you want to win. If you don’t want to win, then why did you train? Why did you go? You didn’t have to go. If you wanted someone else to win, you could have stayed home. That’s something that Edith and I both understand. It never mattered to us if we were running in the same event because once they said, “Take your mark,” I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me. We were competitors—both there to win. And once it was over, we were friends again—two friends who had just done their best at what both of them came to do.
So running has never come between us—which is not to say we agree on everything. We don’t. But if we disagree, we have a conversation about it. I’m that way with anybody I would call a friend. I feel that you should be able to at least talk things through. You won’t always settle everything, but you give people respect if they deserve it, and respecting someone means knowing that everyone has their own mind.
Although not all the Tigerbelles are as close as Edith and me, everybody has a crew, and all the crews stick together. There are several different generations of Tigerbelles, and each one has a different personality—a group chemistry. The crew that Wilma was a part of got along, and they would always help each other, but there was also a lot of wolftalking between them—who’s better, who could whip who, that type of thing—which brought a lot of liveliness to the whole process and sometimes still does. They were a bit different from our generation, and Mr. Temple had to treat them a little differently than he treated us. Or at least he tried.
Our group didn’t so much talk about each other; we didn’t boast a lot. Matter of fact, we didn’t boast at all. We were very quiet, and pretty much whatever Mr. Temple said, we were going to try to do. Pretty much. With some exceptions, of course. We were just a little bit more—I’m not sure what the right word is—reserved, maybe? Some of the mood was set by whoever was captain of the team. That was the whole point of naming captains. Being top on the list speed-wise wasn’t enough for Mr. Temple; if you weren’t respected, you would never be captain.
With our group it was more—at least, I like to think—that we were all equal, despite the fact that Edith and I were captain and cocaptain. Nobody was bothered by us having those positions. And there wasn’t very much for us to say to them. “You need to follow Mr. Temple’s rules,” we would tell them, “and if you’re not going to follow his rules, you should not bring attention to yourself so that he is knowing that you’re not following them.”
Funny thing is, I feel that Mr. Temple knew that we were going to get into some trouble, but that it wasn’t going to be bad trouble. He wanted each of us to grow to be our own person, and that meant finding the limits to what we wanted to do. But he was also a good judge of character, and he respected us; he knew that we respected him, and that as a group we respected our families—that we were a crew that was going to be thinking about what our parents had taught us, and if we were going to do anything, we would be thinking about how it would look to our families. He knew we wouldn’t want to do anything to disgrace them, let alone something that would get us sent home.
That was true for me, and I think it was true for a lot of the young girls who were there. Most of us came from families where you were not encouraged to question what your elders told you to do—or you could question things, but how you questioned them mattered. You had to really think before you started talking. I believe our whole team got along because we were all coming from that same kind of place—not to say that the older crew was not like that, but they were a little more rambunctious.
Of course, when we saw them, at fifteen, sixteen, we never knew there were any ruffles between them because that didn’t come through—not to us. To us, they were just Tigerbelles, people we looked up to—the ones who taught us whatever we needed to know, to be good on the track and at school, how to talk to Mr. Temple. They taught us how to play cards—how to play Bid Whist and Tonk and Spades. We would get together after the five a.m. practice and play until it was time to go back to practice at nine. We would play all day long and half of the night and talk junk and just have a good time, and the older girls made sure of it. Because however rambunctious they were, they took their roles seriously. That was part of being a Tigerbelle. You’re supposed to help teach the younger ones. And that attitude of mutual support is some of the glue that holds us together to this day.
Even at the time, young as we were, we were all very conscious of the need to take care of each other. Some people may have come from cities—from Atlanta or from one of the bigger towns in Alabama or Mississippi, maybe even been on a college campus before—but a lot of us came from small towns, and for us, just being able to get on a train and get to Tennessee State was an adventure in itself. So from the moment we arrived, support was something we wanted to give and to get.
All the different generations are like that—supportive. And even though our generation was a little quieter, we spoke our minds when we needed to. Edith, for one, has no trouble saying what she thinks, but never in a bad way. If things have to be said, she is the one to say them—which is good for me because you know I don’t want to have to do it. When we were captain and cocaptain, Edith did all the talking; she would want me to talk, and I would say, “You have to tell them. You’re the captain.” Even recently, before Mr. Temple passed, he would say that if someone wanted to talk to him or to the Tigerbelles, “Everything needs to go through McGuire and Tyus.”
And I would tell Edith, “Your name came first. It has to go through you.” Because Edith is just better at talking than I am. She’s diplomatic. I’m not.
Edith was about two years ahead of me, and the girls who were with her—Vivian, Lorraine, Marcella, and Flossie—and the girls who came in with me—Evelyn, Essie, and Cynthia—all became friends, although I’m closest with Edith. Flossie and I don’t talk all the time, but every now and then one of us will call. And I still see Gloria, who only ran one year in the summer program; she lives in Atlanta, so we never completely lose sight of each other. Cynthia lived in LA until she also moved to Atlanta, and we have always stayed in contact. Same with Evelyn, who was my roommate at Tennessee State after Marcella; I went to Florida to celebrate her seventieth birthday in 2016, and she and I talk often. Carrie, who was one of the team managers, lives right down the street from me, so it’s easy for us to be in touch.
But it’s not only those Tigerbelles who are friends who stay in contact and help each other out. People’s personal likes and dislikes are less important than the fact that, even to this day, we know how to work as a team. Although the different groups, the different generations, are tighter with each other than they are with the others, all the Tigerbelles have a support network. When something happens, good, bad, or indifferent, you make it your business to know, or if you can be at someone’s event, you try to mak
e sure you’re there. If someone is coming to LA, I find out where they’re going to be and figure out if we can get together. We also see each other at meets, and if any Tigerbelle gets sick, we will call her and each other, get everybody on top of what’s going on, and see what we can do to help. When Mamie Rallins passed away, we were all on the phone until we knew that somebody from the Tigerbelles was able to go to the funeral and represent us. The support comes through us from the Tigerbelles who came before and goes past us to the Tigerbelles who came after. That was what Mr. Temple always wanted us to know: that everyone is an important link in the chain. I almost don’t know how to convey how I feel about the Tigerbelles. You can leave home and still feel at home, and that means a lot to me.
* * *
Up until he passed in 2016, Mr. Temple was a crucial part of that network. Edith and I used to talk to him all the time, especially when he reached his eighties, and he was still very attuned to whatever was happening to his Tigerbelles and giving a lot of his self—just like he always did. Back in the day, he had a wife and two children, he taught sociology at Tennessee State, he ran the post office on campus, and he was our coach, so he was always traveling, yet he managed to not only hold all of that together but also see beyond. He knew that Black women wanted something other than just a sedentary-type life, that track gave us an opportunity to do extraordinary things, and that there was more for us to do than be a teacher or a nurse—although if that was what you wanted to do, he would encourage you to do it. I never thought a Black woman with some schooling could have an occupation other than those two until I went to Tennessee State and got to talk to Tigerbelles who had gone places and done things—things I had just heard about or maybe read in a book. Mr. Temple got us to see beyond what society expected for us at the time, and if he had done nothing else, that would still have been enough.