by Wyomia Tyus
There are no words that I can find to describe him that would truly do him justice. He was just a great man, with so much pride and integrity. Who would ever think that in the fifties and sixties he could pull off what he did? Have all these Black women go on to be not just Olympic champions but champions in whatever work they did? We always talk about the medal winners, but he also gave a lot to young women who never broke a tape, never made an international team—women he kept on the team so that they could get an education. And he never did it to try to bathe himself in glory. He did it because he had a vision that Black girls and women could do and be more.
I’m just glad that he was part of my life, especially that he was a part of my young life, because I don’t know what I would have done without him. He was a gift to me, a gift to my life.
Thank you, Mr. Temple. Again.
My last walk on the track with Mr. Temple. (Photo by Duane Tillman.)
Chapter 13.
Black Women in Sports: Then and Now
At the time that I was competing, there were two main obstacles to my becoming an athlete: being Black and being female. There were others, but just those two would have been plenty, and not just for me: Black women and Black girls in general got no encouragement from the community, let alone the wider society. I was lucky; I was a person who had opportunities. I was supported when it counted by the people in my high school, and I was always encouraged by my family. My family wanted more—not just for me, but for all of us. When I was a young girl, my parents made me feel that whatever I wanted to do, I should be able to do. And I think that was different from what most girls were hearing at the time—it might even be different from what most girls are hearing now.
When you listen to guys coach their sons or coach other people’s sons, you hear them saying, “If you want to win, you’ve got to be the best. Somebody knock you down, you got to get up.” I think a lot of girls were not taught that way—to get up and fight back, to not let yourself get punished, to not let somebody keep you down—but I was taught that at a very early age. Having older brothers and playing with guys all the time backed up the lesson, so I knew: I have to be able to fight, and scrap, and do everything I need to do to win. If I’m going to cry, I cry in my pillow; I don’t cry in front of you. We were all that way: if you want to cry, you got to go inside the house to sit and mope, and if you do that, you’re not going to have anybody to play with—and you’re going to have to go back to them someday. So you have to start somewhere to develop that strength from within, and I got to start real early.
We were also taught that it’s important to feel good about what you’re doing. If something makes you feel happy, then that makes that your life, pretty much. You do what makes you happy if it’s possible, if it doesn’t infringe on other people—what makes you happy. Not what society thinks you should be, thinks you should do. So when my great-aunts would tell me that muscles are ugly, I didn’t mind. I heard them, but what I heard in my head was: What your body looks like is good. Your body lets you do what you feel good doing. And when they said that I was never going to have a husband, that I was never going to have children, I would think: Like I really care at this point in my life. Not looking for a man. Not looking for a boyfriend or a husband or to have children. I’m enjoying what I’m doing. I couldn’t say that to them, of course, but it was always in my mind. I was a carefree type of child. That’s what my parents wanted for me. Grow up being a kid, be who you are, and enjoy what you do. And who I was was strong and fast. And I got to feel good about the whole thing.
It wasn’t just my parents who helped me to feel that way. My brothers really appreciated how strong I was, and the other guys we played with appreciated it too, especially when I had to be on their team because my brothers were mad at me or whatever. Some girls have to grow up with people saying, “Girls can’t do this, girls can’t do that.” But when I look back, I don’t think we heard, “She’s a girl, she shouldn’t play with us,” more than once or twice. We probably heard it in the beginning, with new people, but after a while, it just went away. I was never the last one picked, I can tell you that. Sometimes people would even tease my brothers: “Your sister can beat you! She’s faster than you!” But they didn’t care what people said. They just wanted me to be my best. So when I think about my brothers, I think about the part they played in my being able to be the person I was as a kid, being able to go off to college, and being able to go to the Olympics.
Because of all that, when I was competing, I was competing for me and my family. I really wasn’t thinking very much about representing my country because the country hadn’t done anything for me. It kept me—really, it tried to keep me—down. Not just me as an athlete. Me as a person. The whole Jim Crow era was about not celebrating me or people like me, and I brought that with me to every race. It was not like nowadays, when Black athletes are all running for the country and draped in flags. That flag hadn’t done anything to prepare me for the Olympics, and when I came back, it still didn’t do anything for me—not that I was ever the type to drape myself in a flag anyway. First and foremost, I was out there for my family, then Mr. Temple, then Tennessee State, and then friends—the people who encouraged me, and all the people who helped my mom.
I guess you could say I did represent the US in some ways—I can’t deny where I’m from, and there’s not another country that I would like to live in. As bad as things have been, and as not-so-great as they still are, to me this is the country to be in to make change and have a voice and not be totally shut out, or shut down, or put away. So the country came in at some point, but it was later—much later. Because unlike the country, my family was always there for me. And when I look at the big picture, it’s easy to see that not everybody had the type of family I have, so they needed support from country and community more than I did. But most women just weren’t encouraged to go out and do well—to be really good at something—except maybe taking care of a family. So say you liked playing softball and wanted to be very good at it. That was on you—you, alone. No support from anyone. You had to be that strong.
Another part of the problem when I was coming up was a lack of coaching for women, especially in the small towns. Maybe it was different in larger cities, but in small towns you would have a teacher who taught physical education who might know enough to be a coach, and that was it. I was lucky that the women who coached me in both junior high and high school had gotten their degrees in physical education. They knew what to do—up to a point. But there was really no reason for most women to take it any further. Women coaches were not only not rewarded; they weren’t recognized, which meant that you just didn’t hear anything about them, so you couldn’t even aspire to be a female coach of female athletes, really. You would have to be a visionary—like Mr. Temple—to even think of such a thing.
Meanwhile, the men were not coaching women, not even a little bit. At my school, the female PE teachers coached the women’s teams and the male PE teachers coached the men’s teams. There was one male teacher who did try to support us, but he wasn’t a coach. He just happened to be the son of Miss Jessie Lee, the woman who was with me and my mom that first time we got a visit from Mr. Temple. He was my social studies teacher, and he had graduated from high school when he was fifteen or so and then came back to teach after he went to college, even though he was just a little older than we were. He knew a lot about sports just out of personal interest, and he was one of the people who drove the station wagons to the meets. He always thought I could run. But he came from a family that was all about going places and changing things. Where and when I was born, there just weren’t enough people like that, not enough teachers, not enough programs for all the girls who might have been interested in participating. And even if you really wanted it, even if you were really strong, you only had two choices: you had track, and you had basketball, and that was it.
Most people’s attitude was simple: women are not supposed to do these things. They were not
to be athletes—not great athletes, at least. If you wanted to run, if you wanted to compete, then that was cute: “Oh, you want to play? Oh, go play! Stay out of trouble!” That was the attitude then. Don’t be serious. Don’t be good. And I think there were a lot of women who fell by the wayside who were just as good if not better than I was at either running or playing basketball but just couldn’t see a way to make it work for them. Who is going to work hard—and being an athlete is hard work—at something that has no chance of going anywhere? Your hard work has to go somewhere. I played basketball throughout high school, but I knew I was not going to go anywhere with basketball because there was nowhere to go. And I continued track because of Mr. Temple—because he gave me a place to go. But he couldn’t see every girl, and I feel very lucky that he did see me, saw my potential, and thought that I could make that potential grow.
Yet I often wonder: What if I hadn’t gone to the Fort Valley meet? What if he hadn’t seen me? What if any little thing had gone differently? On that one day. And what did he see that I didn’t see? Because I was just out there having fun and enjoying it while still wanting to be the best and wanting to win; I did have that winning attitude. But there were other girls out there with that attitude too—I know because they were beating me. Mr. Temple saw something in me that he didn’t see in those other girls; I don’t know what it was, but he had the eye for it. Still, I wonder: what if there had been other coaches looking for a way to compete with Mr. Temple? What would they have seen? Who would they have chosen? We will never know because that just wasn’t there. None of it. There were only two sports, and only one of them could go anywhere, and at first “going somewhere” meant going to Tennessee State or Tuskegee—small Historically Black Universities that could only take so many women. Sure, Texas Southern University and University of Hawaii started programs after a while. But how many people from the Deep South were going to go to Hawaii at that time?
And remember that this was the Jim Crow South, which means that all the people I’ve been talking about so far were Black people. So on the one hand, Black women and girls faced different obstacles than Black men and boys. But then there were also obstacles that were based on Black and white. For example, when the schools got integrated, all our records—all the records of all the Black athletes in all the Black schools at all the Black meets, all our times and trophies and accomplishments—they just threw them out the back door. My husband Duane has asked me, “What kind of times did you run in high school?” And all I have is my memory. You could go all the way to Georgia and look through all the archives, and you wouldn’t find any records of what we’d done, the times we ran, the games we won in basketball, nothing. When they integrated the schools, they cleaned the slate—started over, like we were never there.
* * *
When talking about what needs to change today, I think it’s important to remember what it was like back then. I suspect it’s difficult for someone who came up after Title IX to truly imagine it. But you have to understand where we came from and how far we have come. Because things have definitely changed—not enough, but they have changed. You think about what Mr. Temple did—he did it all without Title IX. He was Title IX, so to speak—a one-man Title IX. He was it. So Title IX was big in and of itself, but I think things had started to change long before that. Women started to speak out, which gave momentum to the work of the Women’s Sports Foundation as I mentioned before. By the time Title IX was being discussed, women were already comfortable speaking out about why it was necessary. The feeling was that girls should be able to play sports. Period.
Now, it’s not only women’s minds that have changed. There are a lot of men out there who are rooting for their daughters, who want to make sure their daughters have equal access to the playing field. You see it in soccer and softball, in baseball and volleyball. A lot more coaches, male coaches, are becoming involved in young women’s lives and pushing for young girls to participate in sports. At the 2016 Olympic Trials for track and field in Eugene, Oregon, I noticed that there were professional football players not just cheering on but coaching their daughters. One was Randall Cunningham, a retired star NFL quarterback, whose daughter, Vashti Cunningham, made the team in the high jump. And then there’s Michael Carter, who was an Olympian and played football for the San Francisco 49ers. His daughter, Michelle Carter, won the gold medal for the shot put in the Rio Olympics. Football players encouraging their daughters to compete? Coaching their daughters? Back in the day, men might coach their sons if they thought they had potential. But that was not happening for women when I was competing. That, to me, is a big change.
But for those of us who want more change and more growth, I think it’s important to look into what makes change happen. I know competition had to have a lot to do with it; sports fans, the ones who really care, want to see the best. But it’s also about what America wants as a nation, particularly when it comes to the Games. The people at the top want us to come home with all the medals. They want to be the best—even if it doesn’t really have anything to do with them and they don’t want to have anything to do with us, the athletes, present or past. More than anything, I think the Olympic Games are a spectacle, a showcase of national power, and when I was competing it was even clearer than it is today: we had to go out there and beat those Russians!
Some people try to say that’s not what it’s about. They say it’s all about bringing different countries together and building the world community. I think that’s a great idea. That’s certainly what the Olympics did for me in ’64. But I don’t think that’s what the people in charge are looking to accomplish, and every so often those true colors come right out—like when Jimmy Carter called for a boycott of the 1980 Olympics in the USSR.[24] That year it was very obvious, but it seems to me that it’s always about coming out on top—and the US better come out on top.[25] Because whatever people say about global togetherness, many are actually more concerned with national competition, which is obvious in the fact that as soon as countries are brought together, they are split apart again by all the medal counting that goes on. First it was the US against the Soviet Union, now it’s the US against Russia and China. It’s never going to be just: Everybody go out there and run for it—run free! I don’t think most people would appreciate that. It would be more like, “Great, great, they won, but what country are they from?” Because it’s so ingrained.
And all that together means that if the US needs Black women athletes to win, then opportunities are going to open up for Black women athletes, and they are going to keep opening up as long as Black women keep excelling at sports—because the US just has to stay on top. Sometimes the good can sneak in with the bad. And because of the Olympics, because of what we “did for our country,” past athletes get at least some recognition every four years. I always know when the Olympics are coming around because it’s amazing how many phone calls I get. If you look at my job records, you’ll see that the sports-promoting gigs came pretty much every four years. All the in-between years were very lean. And a lot of the time, they aren’t even offering money for those “jobs.” They just want you to show up.
That’s something else that has changed for the better: you can make a living off of track in a way that you just couldn’t do when I was competing, especially on the European circuit—although there’s money in the US for track athletes too. You can compete in five or six meets, and if you win all or most of the races, you get a big bonus. And you don’t have to wait until you’re done with the Olympics anymore; you can do it all: get paid for competing, for breaking records, for winning races, for wearing some company’s shoes. You couldn’t do any of that in my day, and to me that’s a huge improvement because I think everybody should get paid.
I remember the Seoul Olympics in1988 when the USA men’s basketball team lost the gold medal to Russia.[26] After that, pro athletes could play basketball in the Olympics, and in my opinion that’s pretty much what broke it all open. Before that, the American
officials would say, “Professionals in the Olympics? That’s so wrong! Olympians should be amateurs. Only the Europeans pay their athletes—those cheaters!” But if the USA doesn’t want to lose, and the state doesn’t want to support the athletes, what are they going to do but go pro? And it took something like that—for the US to lose in men’s basketball, which they had always won—to make it happen. After that, the officials were saying: “Oh no! We can’t have that! We need to send our best athletes to the Games! Something must change!”
Of course, it wasn’t like that for me or anyone else from my generation, and like I’ve said, that’s what happens when you’re a pioneer; you don’t get the same benefits as those who come after. But I’m still grateful that it has happened. Because athletes work so hard—it’s a job. You have to train, you have to stay strong in mind and body, you have to risk injury. There’s a lot to being an Olympic athlete that most people never see. So I am all for athletes getting paid, and I think the same thing should happen for college football. I feel very strongly about that. Most college teams are highly exploited. The schools can make a lot of money off them—tons! And the players get nothing. They just use them up—especially in football. Because in football you can mess yourself up forever and make yourself no good for anything.[27] They should be paid.
In addition to the possibility—not a guarantee, but at least a chance—for athletes to earn a living doing what they love, there are also a lot more opportunities for women in general and for women of color in particular to compete in a wider variety of sports. While I was competing and for many years after I stopped, the number of people of color on American Olympic teams other than track was very, very small. If you looked at figure skating or gymnastics or swimming, there were very few people of color. And everybody would say, “It costs too much to train in those sports. People of color are too poor.” That may be one factor, but I know it’s not the only factor. Because you could find a way—if you had encouragement, if you had role models, if there were programs. There was always a way. So it was never just about money. Race—racism—was also a part of it.[28]