Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  But of course there was more. There was something about him that made it possible for us as women to accept him, to let him be a part of our lives. Even with some of his antiquated ideas—and you know we disagreed with some of them—we still allowed him to be who he was and accepted what his program was about. Because we all had to give a little so that we could work together to get what we wanted. If I had gone in and said, “You can’t tell me who to date!” I would have been home the next day—on the train with the comic book and the apple. But as strong-headed as I am, I knew I wanted more than a boyfriend, and I knew that I could get a boyfriend all by myself. But to get the things I really wanted, I needed help. I needed support. And Mr. Temple was the key to that support.

  Some of the girls would say, “I just don’t like this. I’m going to go talk to him.” It’s difficult when you’re young; you know what you want to say or do, and you know it so hard. But you can also not say certain things, and that’s not going to kill your pride either—although sometimes it takes a minute to figure out which things you might not want to say. One example was when we were pledging to be in sororities, and Mr. Temple took us off the line two or three times because he heard that some crazy stuff was going on and didn’t want the Tigerbelles to be involved. So we couldn’t pledge for a week. Edith was a Delta, and she didn’t like that, so she went into his office and said, “Mr. Temple, I need to talk to you.” And then she said what she had to say about Tigerbelles not being able to be on the line for a week.

  After she finished, Mr. Temple told her what he thought about what the Deltas were doing.

  “Mr. Temple,” she said, “that is Delta business.”

  When Mr. Temple told the story in later years, he would always say: “I let her finish”—he never once told the story without saying that. “I let her finish,” he would say, “and when she finished, I told her, ‘If it wasn’t for the Tigerbelles, you wouldn’t have no Delta business. So this is Tigerbelle business, which is my business. Deltas don’t have no business! You would not be sitting up here too long telling me about Delta business if it wasn’t for Tigerbelle business. You can just go on out of this office.’”

  Edith talks on this all the time, now that we’re older, and she has some perspective. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she’ll say, “going into his office and telling him, ‘That’s Delta business!’ Like, who was I?” But at the time, she didn’t see it that way.

  * * *

  Edith and I made the decision years ago that we would go back to Tennessee State every year at homecoming. That way, we not only got to see Mr. Temple, but also a lot of the people who we went to school with—although we mainly went to see him. And when we went back for homecoming, we would sit and talk with Mr. Temple for hours and not even know half the things we’d talked about; just the mere fact of talking to him made the time go by so fast. He mellowed a lot over the years, and I gave myself the opportunity to enjoy that, to enjoy the best part of him, not just the whole coach thing, which was really great because I never got to have that with my father as an adult. And I got to see him recognizing me as an adult, as an equal.

  Because you know, with Mr. Temple, whatever he thought was going to come right on out of his mouth. Once, we were in Sacramento, and Kathy McMillan, who won a silver medal in the long jump in 1976, came up and was hugging him, but Mr. Temple didn’t recognize her. “Who are you?” he said.

  “Mr. Temple,” we said, “that’s Kathy.”

  Now, Kathy had always been thin, but she had gotten older and wasn’t as thin anymore. And Mr. Temple just looked at her and said, “Kathy McMillan? Shoot. You look like a shot putter. You need to go out there and put that shot around. You make a team, putting the shot.”

  And we were like, Oh my God, did he really say that?

  But Kathy just laughed. And after he left, she told us, “Don’t worry, I know him.”

  And knowing him meant knowing that he would say any word that came into his head—unless it was a curse word. When we were young, he would never use any profanity when we were around. And then one time, several years before he passed, Edith and I were visiting, and when we left his room we could barely keep ourselves from laughing, and as soon as we got out the door, Edith said, “Did you hear him? He used the word shit.”

  He would never, ever, ever say anything like that when we were younger. There we were, nearly seventy years old, with our hands over our mouths, saying, “Oh my God, he used a curse word. Did you hear him say that?!” We got in the car and just laughed all the way back to the hotel. Because we knew he finally saw as adults—people he could cuss around. That is the kind of thing we will remember.

  But there was also the pleasure of just sitting there and talking about how he saw the Tigerbelles, and realizing that through all those years, and with all these different women, the reason he could put up with all of us was that he understood us. He had a perspective on every girl. I believe he understood each and every one of us, that he understood each and every one of our needs. Can you imagine the energy that must have taken? To have so many girls and women come in and out of his life and still have time and attention for each of us?

  Of course, when it came down to discipline and things like that, he did it all the same way across the board, so no one would feel that there was favoritism. That’s just who he was, and you couldn’t fault him for that. But for him to be able to do what he did for hundreds of Black women in such a way that most of them appreciate it—and I think all of them do, really deep down—is just incredible to me. I am always speechless when it comes to describing how I feel about what he did. For me. For so many of us. How do you say thank you? How did he ever come up with the whole idea that I could do what I did? How did he know I could make it work? How did he build trust in the parents who let their daughters come to Tennessee State at such a young age? Where did he get the strength to assure them, “Your daughter’s going to be safe”? And he did keep us safe. In that place. At that time. For him to do that, I mean, I look at that, and I’m just—wow. Speechless.

  And even when things were hard, he was not a complainer—or a boaster. He never wanted to take credit for anything he did. When he talked about it, he would say, “All that stuff fell in my lap, pretty much; I was just flying by the seat of my pants, doing the things that I felt were right.” He just wanted to make sure that the team stayed on top, that people respected us, and that, more than anything, we respected ourselves. In the later years he would tell us, “You know, I may not have done all the things I should have done or could have done for you all, but my way of doing things was the only way I knew to do it. It didn’t work for some of them, and some of them had to go. You know how young people are. I lost a lot of good ones, probably, but I will never know because they’re gone. But I know the ones who stayed are the pure at heart, and that it worked then, and it still works, because look what I have now: all of you, out of school and doing well for yourselves.”

  And it was good to hear that, to know that he had some sense that there were people who couldn’t understand why he did things the way he did or thought he was crazy. It wasn’t ever that he couldn’t see other perspectives. He was very self-aware, which made me respect him even more.

  * * *

  At first, after Mr. Temple passed, I didn’t think I would be able to talk about it. When I came back from the memorial, Duane said, “You’ve got to get in a better frame of mind.” And I said, “I know. I’ve got to talk about this for the book. I owe it to Mr. Temple.” So I have worked on myself. I even had to take some time away from Edith because we were both struggling, and every time we’d talk about it, she would cry. I’m not going to be able to finish this book like this, I said to myself. If I’m going to end it where I’m the best that I can be, I’m going to have to just do nothing but work on myself. So I did.

  In some ways, it was like losing my father all over again. But in others it was also a lot different in that I knew he was sick. It wasn’t sudd
en, wasn’t a surprise. The last couple of years, whenever we tried to make plans for the future, he’d always say, “I’m not going to be around.” When I talked to my friend Cora about it and told her how it made me feel that he was always saying that, she said, “Well, he’s just trying to prepare you. He knows what kind of time you had with your dad.”

  And she was right: he had been trying to prepare me—trying to prepare all of us—for years. After we had the fifty-year anniversaries—for the 1960 team in 2010 and the 1964 team in 2014—he told me, “Tyus, I won’t be here for ’68. I was here for ’64. You had your fifty years!”

  We were in Nashville at the time, at a luncheon. “Well, you know I like those doubles,” I told him. “You have to do it again—four more years!”

  But he was right. And when I truly look back, I know he said it in all the ways he could. But he was also saying: “You guys should keep on keeping on, doing what you do. I’m just so glad I got to see you do so many wonderful things, see you get your lives back together even though they were not so together at times. You turned out to be great young ladies.”

  * * *

  So I started to prepare myself. I mean, when my dad died, I was not prepared. I was fifteen. I had had very little experience with life and no experience with death; when my dad passed, he was the only person besides his own mother who had died in my family since I was born. That was difficult.

  But going through that at fifteen and then growing helped me to realize that, you know, people are going to go. You just don’t want them to go before you think it’s their time. For my father, I never thought that it was his time. That it could be his time was nowhere in my head. But with Mr. Temple, because of the maturity that had come in, the experience I’d had of so many people passing in my life, it was possible for me to see that he was ready.

  The whole process of going through death and being around people who are dying forces you to grow in a different way from any other kind of growth I have experienced. My mom died in 2008, and then my brother Jackie in 2013. Jimmy Lee had died many years before that, back in the seventies. I don’t want to say you get used to it, but you know the signs, and you have to say to yourself, There’s not too much I can really do about that; I’ve just got to get my mind wrapped around it. That’s kind of how I felt with Mr. Temple. And he did what he could to help me, which was the opposite of what my mom did: Mr. Temple kept saying he was leaving, and my mom kept saying she wasn’t going to go—that she was going to hang on until there was nothing left that she could do. She would lie in her hospital bed and say, “I can’t seem to remember anybody’s name—can you still remember names?”

  “Yeah, I can still remember names.”

  “Well, you live long enough, and you’re not going to be able to remember names.” She was a stone believer: just keep on living, and eventually you won’t be able to do anything. There were still a lot of things that she could do, which to her meant she wasn’t going to go. She was eighty-nine when she died, just like Mr. Temple, and whatever else I could say about what she did or what she said, she taught me a good lesson and one that I will always remember. Because I was there when all the doctors said, “We can’t do anything. It’s over.” But it wasn’t over. She was still funny and crazy. She was who she was, right up to the end, and that is something to know.

  Me and my mama after the park reception. (Photo by Duane Tillman.)

  The saddest part for me about Mr. Temple’s death is that I didn’t get there before he passed away. I would talk to him and say, “I’ll see you at homecoming”—and we’re only talking three weeks: three weeks between when he died and when I was planning to arrive. I should have made a better effort, but I kept thinking: He’s going to be there; he’ll be okay.

  Back in the day I would call him once a month, but later I started calling him once a week. And I knew, just in the way he was speaking to me, that he was ready to go. That prepared me some more. So I put it in perspective in my heart, although I didn’t know how I was going to handle it. In one way, he was just like my mom, totally himself the whole way. He laughed and talked; he was so clear of mind. It was just that his body was failing him. When I called him for his birthday, he told me, “Tyus, they doing everything they can to keep me alive, but I’m not going to be here.”

  “Why you saying that? You know I can’t come now. I’ll be there in October, so you just got to hang on.”

  “I’m not going to be here in October, Tyus. You need to understand that. All right?”

  He died two days later. Edith was there, and he was really happy that she was with him. His daughter Edwina was also there; she had taken off work, and she stayed with him in the hospital for about two weeks. She went home at night, but other than that, she was there the whole time. I wish I could have been there too.

  * * *

  Both the church service and the memorial program for Mr. Temple were uplifting. According to Edwina, Mr. Temple had said: “I don’t want no foolishness at my memorial. I don’t want people I don’t know speaking over me.”

  People kept telling her, “You should let this or that person talk.”

  But Edwina would say, “No, I’m not having my daddy coming back here shaking my house. He said what he wanted, and I’m doing exactly what he said.”

  I think the fact that he had it all planned was another sign he was ready. He chose the people he wanted to speak ahead of time. He had Lucinda from Wilma’s era, and of course he had to have his Gold Dust Twins, so both Edith and I got to speak—he had us in order: Lucinda, then Edith, then me. And then Cheese—Chandra Cheeseborough-Guice—who took over coaching the Tigerbelles after Mr. Temple retired. We were the four Tigerbelles he chose to speak. I don’t even remember what I said. I just spoke from how I felt. And I felt a lot.

  Other people did other things: Ralph Boston was the master of ceremonies and Madeline Manning Mims—who won the gold medal in the 800 meters at the 1968 Olympics and was the first American woman ever to do so—sang a gospel song. The best thing about the memorial was that you could really see his legacy. Tigerbelles came from all the generations, not only the women that Mr. Temple had coached but from Cheese’s era as well. The women from Mr. Temple’s last team before he retired are especially dedicated to him. There’s one in particular whose name is Rhonda, but we call her Baby Belle because she’s one of the last of Mr. Temple’s “products.” She’s also one of the nicest people I have ever met, and she would have fit in well during our era. I really felt for Baby Belle because in one of the quiet times she told us, “You know, since I’ve been here, I keep going to his house, and I just sit out in front and look at it because I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  * * *

  I am still grieving, of course. I mean, I have my days. One thing that continues to sadden me is the lack of press around his passing. His memorial service was at the school, and I was disappointed that the press didn’t do anything for him. The Tennessean did, as usual; I’m talking about national press and the sportscasters. There was an obituary in the New York Times, and the Ohio Valley Conference livestreamed his memorial service, but that was about it. I don’t understand it. Here was this man who had done things that no other coach had ever done or is likely ever to do, who was known around the world. And we’ve got all these sportscasters, all these sportspeople, who are such fans of the Tigerbelles. But they never spoke about his death. When other coaches have passed and gone, there was something every half hour about how they had passed away, or how they had lived, or how they had settled their affairs. But for Mr. Temple? Nothing. There were some exceptions, of course; sports journalist Dave Zirin, for example, wrote a wonderful article. But why is that all? This icon, this man who did so much and gave so much to this country, passes with barely a notice. That sat with me for a while.

  But then it occurred to me that it was just like being a Tigerbelle—just like he had warned us it would be: we would go out into the world and perhaps do amazing things, but because we we
re Black women, we better do them because that was what we wanted to do; we shouldn’t expect to get honored for it, not by the powers-that-be. I guess that turned out to be true for him as a Black man as well. And I think he would be okay with that. “I want my flowers when I’m living,” he used to say. “When I’m dead, I can’t smell ’em.”

  Regardless of the press or lack thereof, he’s just going to be missed. I’m not the funeral type, but when I go back to Griffin, I visit my mom’s grave and talk to her like she can hear. And because my mom and my brother Jackie are not too far from each other, I talk to him too, and then I’m done with that. Maybe it will be the same with Mr. Temple. It’s just that I’m not too depressed because I feel that I’ve been totally fulfilled by having him in my life and being able to see the changes he made in my life—the way he helped to make me who I am today, gave me the tools to work with, made me believe that I had a lot to offer and a lot to give, even if he never quite put it that way.

  Sometimes when I feel sad, I start thinking about the crazy things: “You can’t date a football player! You can’t do this! You can’t do that!” Edith and I were talking the other day, and I said, “He told us we shouldn’t do these things, and we just kept on doing them because we knew he couldn’t see us. But now he can see us, Edith. He can see us.”

  And that’s a good thing. I’m in a real good place with Mr. Temple, more so than I would have thought. It’s probably because of his philosophy, the philosophy that he passed down to us. He wanted so much for us. He wanted us to do well, and continue to do well, and to think of others. “Don’t be selfish with your doing well,” he would tell us. “You have to think of other people too.”