Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics

by Jeremy Schaap

  Like so many young men momentarily in the presence of a significant figure, Jesse was profoundly influenced by his brief encounter with Paddock. Here in the flesh was the man whose records he sought. Paddock had an aura; Jesse could sense it, and he wanted one too. It mattered not a whit to Jesse that Paddock was a white man, to whom, unlike Jesse, no doors were barred at that time.

  In the fall of 1930, just as he was turning seventeen, Jesse finally entered Cleveland’s East Technical High School. He and Riley were not parted, however. Edgar Weil, East Tech’s novice track coach, asked Riley to assist him. Riley, of course, eagerly assented to Weil’s request. For the next three years Riley continued to develop Jesse’s form, as Jesse Owens became a world-class sprinter and broad jumper. By the spring of 1932, when Jesse was eighteen, he had progressed to the point where it was not unreasonable for him to think he might qualify for the American Olympic team that would be competing in Los Angeles that summer. In fact, on June 11, in Cleveland, he ran 100 meters in 10.3 seconds, breaking the world record Paddock had established in 1921. Meet officials, though, did not allow the record, because the tailwind was too strong. Still, Jesse’s performance qualified him for the semi-final central Olympic track-and-field tryouts at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the following week.

  In Evanston, Jesse Owens was exposed for the first time to world-class competition on a grand scale. Three hundred of the best track men in the Midwest and a few from the South assembled at Dyche Stadium, including Tolan and the hurdler Glenn Hardin. At eighteen, Owens was younger than most of his rivals but hardly a child. That day, though, for perhaps the only time in his life, he was out of his league. Tolan, the first black man to win two Olympic gold medals, was twenty-three. It is unlikely that he had ever paid any attention to the exploits of East Tech’s Jesse Owens.

  Racing against America’s best that day in Evanston, Owens failed to make much of an impact. He did not qualify for the Olympic trials in Palo Alto. He could not defeat Tolan. This time, he could not emulate the thoroughbreds Riley had shown him. Still, he could not help staring at the men he was racing against, the only men he had ever encountered who were so clearly faster than him. At the same time, he saw something that encouraged him. Like most great winners, Owens, even before his accomplishments caught up with his gifts, was blessed with remarkable self-awareness. He was analytical, even if at this time he did not quite know how to communicate to anyone else what he was thinking. That day in Evanston, he looked closely at Tolan and James Johnson and George Simpson and saw that they were human. He saw flaws in their styles. He recognized weaknesses that Riley had pointed out in other runners. Most important, he saw that a day would come when he would be able to compete against them, indeed, a day when he would defeat them. As he gathered his few belongings and walked off the field, he could not help noticing all the people who had crowded around Tolan, who had, as expected, won the 100-meter dash. One day, he thought, the crowds will gather around me. One day, after I gain a little weight and grow an inch or two.

  While Owens weighed barely 140 pounds, Tolan was thickly muscled. Owens understood that with a little more power, he would rise to his level. And even as he lost—a strange, unpleasant experience—he could sense that it was all just a matter of timing. His innate optimism and his burgeoning self-confidence helped him realize that in four years, when he was twenty-two, he would be the sprinter against whom all the others would be measuring themselves. All it would take was dedication. It was clear—to him, and to everyone else—that he had the talent.

  Still, he was disappointed—and embarrassed. When Alvin Silverman of the Plain Dealer reached him after the meet, Owens said, “I haven’t got the heart to see Mr. Riley. He must be terribly ashamed of me. I don’t know what was the matter. I ran as fast as I could, and Lord knows, I tried. But I just didn’t have it. I’m going to work my heart out from now on. I betcha.” Owens even felt that he had let Silverman down. “It was nice for you to try and make me feel good,” he told the reporter, who had followed his high school career closely, “but I’ll bet you’re as much ashamed of me as anybody else.”

  One issue had been weighing heavily on Owens as he tried to keep up with Tolan and Johnson. His girlfriend, a lively, pretty girl named Minnie Ruth Solomon, was eight months pregnant. Ruth, as she was called, was only sixteen. In Cleveland’s black community, her pregnancy was not quite scandalous, as it would have been in white society. Still, it was not exactly something either family was thrilled about. But both families had for years assumed that Jesse and Ruth would eventually build a family of their own. “I fell in love with her some the first time we ever talked,” Owens later said.

  What he liked most about Ruth was the way she carried herself—with dignity, like a princess, which is how he treated her. Her family had come from Georgia, and though the Solomons were poor, as poor as the Owenses, Ruth, well dressed and immaculate, seemed untouched by poverty. When they first met, in junior high school, Jesse carried her books and asked her to marry him. She told him yes, but said they would have to wait. In fact, even as Ruth’s delivery date approached, there were no plans for a wedding. Nevertheless, it was assumed that they would stay together and that Jesse would find some way to help support his child—although it was clear that the child would be supported mostly by Ruth’s parents.

  On August 8, 1932—five weeks after the regional Olympic trials—Ruth gave birth to Gloria Shirley Owens. In later years, Jesse would frequently claim that he and Ruth had married a few weeks before Gloria’s birth. But no contemporaneous records exist anywhere showing that they married in 1932.

  Thirteen days after becoming a father, Owens was back on the track, at an invitational meet in Cleveland that included several elite European runners who were on their way from the just-completed Olympics to the East Coast. More than 50,000 people crammed Municipal Stadium to see the stars from the games—and their own Jesse Owens. Fatherhood apparently agreed with him. He ran 100 yards, on a curved track, in 9.6 seconds, shattering the field, which was reduced to reverence. Erich Borchmeyer of Germany, a silver medalist in Los Angeles in the 4 × 100-meter relay, and Gabriel Salviati of Italy, a bronze medalist in the same event, “hunted up interpreters to extend lavish praises.”

  For the Olympians, it was time to head home. For Jesse Owens, it was time to head back to East Technical High School for his senior year. His athletic achievements had made headlines across the country, and now coaches interested in procuring his services would be swooping down to claim him for their teams. In the black press in particular, the subject of Owens’s choice of college was an important story. It was hoped by some black journalists that the athlete would make a political statement by choosing a progressive school, a place where blacks had been made to feel relatively comfortable. Even the far-off Chicago Defender entered the debate. “He will be an asset to any school,” a Defender editorialist wrote, “so why help advertise an institution that majors in prejudice?”

  But Ohio State—far from a bastion of progressiveness—was the power in collegiate track and field in Ohio, and Owens was an Ohioan. It also didn’t hurt that in Larry Snyder the Buckeyes had an eager and innovative coach who met with Charles Riley’s approval.

  In just one year as the head coach in Columbus, Snyder had become well known for some of his quirky training theories. It was considered highly unusual, for instance, that he had his athletes train to the strains of music being played on the phonograph. Snyder said the musical rhythm helped his runners relax and find their own personal rhythms. He also made a point of converting his middle- and long-distance runners to the heel-and-toe style of running, which had been so expertly practiced by Paavo Nurmi and the other Flying Finns of the 1920s. American distance runners had always run more or less flat-footed.

  Snyder did not personally recruit Owens. That task was handled by some boosters in Cleveland. Like everyone else in track, though, Snyder was watching closely when, on June 17, 1933, in Chicago, his future
charge delivered on all the promise of his talents. In a performance that presaged the miracle day at Ferry Field, Owens equaled Frank Wykoff’s 9.4-second world record at 100 yards, despite stumbling out of the blocks, and set scholastic records in the 220-yard dash and broad jump. But Snyder knew Owens only by reputation when they first met, in early 1934. Like all freshmen at the time, Owens was barred from intercollegiate competition. Nevertheless, on the first day of practice for the spring season, he reported to Snyder’s office, ready to run.

  “Coach, I’m Jesse Owens.” He was, typically, immaculate. His sweatshirt, his shorts—they both looked like they had been pressed by Emma.

  Snyder looked him up and down. “The great Jesse Owens.” He paused, admiring his legs. “I want to know all about you. First, let’s get you out on that track.”

  They worked together that day, just getting acquainted, not knowing, of course, where their partnership would take them. But the bond was immediate. They liked each other—and soon enough respected each other.

  Eventually, inevitably, Snyder would come to be remembered not for the music or the heel-and-toeing. Instead he would be remembered for nurturing the skinny kid from Cleveland, the one who would become the greatest track star ever.

  3

  Vincible

  * * *

  CALIFORNIA: JUNE 1935

  IN THE WAKE of Owens’s big day in Ann Arbor, no less a personage than Will Rogers was overcome with enthusiasm for the Buckeye Bullet. On May 26, in one of his frequent open letters to newspaper editors across the United States, Rogers summarized the weekend’s sporting highlights:

  Los Angeles, May 26—The sporting pages were where the news was this Sunday morning.

  Dear old Babe Ruth, God bless him, stepped into three fast balls and put ’em all out of bounds. Lawson Little, a Stanford boy, for the second year in succession collected a small portion of the British debt with a golf club.

  A Mr. Owens, a colored lad of 21 years from Ohio State University, broke practically all the world records there is, with the possible exception of horseshoe pitching and flagpole sitting.

  Congress laid dormant, Hitler was refueling and Mussolini was changing records. But a man in California sued his wife for non-support.

  Yours,

  WILL ROGERS

  The next day, Rogers, though he’d never met Jesse Owens, still liked him. In another letter to newspaper editors, he lamented three Supreme Court decisions that had seemed to undermine the New Deal—“a Republican holiday,” he wrote—and concluded with these words: “So the Supreme Court just stole the spotlight from Jesse Owens.”

  For his part, Owens had left Ferry Field in a hurry after his remarkable hour on the track. He had no plans to spend the night celebrating. Instead, Charles Riley was waiting for him in his Model T. As they drove through the night to Cleveland, along the shores of Lake Erie, they marveled at what Owens had just achieved and considered the challenges that remained. Riley had a sense, even if Owens did not, that Owens’s life had changed forever. The boy in whom he had recognized some athletic potential had turned out to be the greatest running and jumping talent the world had ever seen. But Riley knew that for a twenty-one-year-old black man in the United States in 1935, nothing was guaranteed. Over the engine noise, he praised Owens but also endeavored to keep him humble.

  For a moment Owens might have thought he was hearing his father, who lived his life with his head down, always careful not to seem too proud in the presence of whites. Riley, he knew, just wanted him to be realistic. After all, there was no real money to be made in track and field. If he was going to find opportunity and security, he would have to continue to excel athletically. “The Olympics,” Riley told him, his knuckles white against the wooden steering wheel, “that’s what matters. Representing your country. Records will be broken, but they can never take away gold medals.”

  “I know, Pops,” Owens said, stretching his back muscles as best he could in the confines of the old Ford. “The Olympics. I’ll be ready.”

  “You mustn’t wear yourself down before Berlin,” Riley said. “You must be prepared to say no. Everyone will want you at their meets. You can’t overdo it.”

  “But I’ve got plenty of time,” Owens said. At twenty-one, he still thought a year was an eternity. “And I’m only getting stronger. Look what I did today, with a bad back.”

  Now he was all but screaming. The car had no muffler, and Riley had no hearing aid.

  “Your injury helped you focus,” Riley countered. “It helped you.”

  “It helped? I could barely walk when I got out there.”

  As they talked, Owens and Riley could see the lights of the tankers moving up and down the lake.

  “But then the pain went away, didn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” Owens said, wondering where Riley was leading him.

  “My point, Jesse, is that you must maintain focus,” Riley said. They were crossing into Ohio now.

  “I know,” Owens said, “I know.” But he barely apprehended all the obstacles he would encounter. How would he maintain focus when he had a child to support, exams to pass, and rivals to overcome? Mostly, by doing what great athletes must always do in similar circumstances. He would practice an icy selfishness—at least through the Olympics.

  Shortly after Riley and Owens arrived in Cleveland on Sunday morning, the media descended on the Owenses’ apartment. “How does it feel to be the world’s fastest human?” a reporter asked.

  “I think the praise is a little too high,” Owens memorably replied. It was more than false modesty, though it was a little of that, too. Mostly it was true ego. Owens thought the praise was a little too high because he knew he could run faster and jump farther. It seemed impossible to him that he might have peaked in Ann Arbor, on a day when his back was sore and the competition far from world-class. Someday, he thought, the praise would be just high enough.

  Fairly obscure outside Cleveland before the Big Ten meet, Owens was soon stunned to find himself celebrated everywhere. In particular, the thriving black press elevated him to its highest pedestal, which he shared with Joe Louis, the heavyweight challenger. Both Owens and Louis were twenty-one years old, both had been born into rural poverty in Alabama, both had been part of the great northward migration to the industrial Midwest, both became stars in 1935, and eventually both would register their greatest victories in defiance of German extremism.

  Even Harvard wanted Owens. The host of the prestigious Intercollegiate Amateur Athletic Association of America meet, which was to take place a week after the meet in Ann Arbor, the university invited Owens to participate. Larry Snyder said thanks, but no thanks. “After last Saturday’s performances,” he told reporters, “it may sound paradoxical to say Jesse is not in the best of shape, but that is the fact. He is taking heat treatments for the [back] injury, but rest will prove the big healer, and that’s what he’s going to get.”

  It had gone largely unnoticed that in addition to breaking the world records, Owens had broken another record in Ann Arbor: Larry Snyder’s fifteen-year-old Ohio State record for points accumulated in a single track season. But Snyder noticed.

  “Now you’ve done it,” he said when they were back in Columbus. “You’ve wiped me off the books.”

  “Don’t worry, coach,” Owens said, smiling his handsome, toothy smile. “You’ll see. I’ll make you famous.” Together they laughed, both confident that he was right.

  That week, Snyder saw to it that Owens was elected team captain. As obvious as the choice might have seemed, no black man had ever before been captain of any Ohio State varsity team. Snyder didn’t like it that Owens and Albritton could not live on campus—or in many places off-campus in Columbus—so he tried as best he could to make the track team, at least, a place where his black athletes would not feel the sting of segregation.

  By training and inclination, Snyder was a daredevil. During World War I he had been a flight instructor, and after the war he had performed in air
shows. Just riding in a primitive biplane required rare courage; pushing one of these planes to its limits was asking to die. But when it came to Owens, Snyder was cautious—not overcautious, but cautious enough. He loved speed, and so of course he loved Owens, so much that he never wanted to see his perfect machine crash.

  Nevertheless, just two weeks after Owens’s feats at Ferry Field, Snyder had him back on the track, and in the spotlight, in Milwaukee, where more than 10,000 people attended the Central Intercollegiate track meet. It was the largest crowd in the ten-year history of the event, and “most of [them] had come to see Owens in action,” Wilfrid Smith wrote in the Chicago Tribune. They also hoped that they would see Owens run against the brilliant Ralph Metcalfe in the 100-yard dash, a confrontation that had been hyped in the national press as an opportunity for Owens to avenge an ancient perceived snub.

  The story goes that Metcalfe, the 1932 Olympic silver medalist in the 100-meter dash, had rudely dismissed Owens a few years earlier at the national interscholastic meet in Chicago, refusing to shake his hand and turning his back on him. It seems unlikely that Metcalfe would have been so ungracious, but by the spring of 1935, as Metcalfe and Owens developed a rivalry, the story had become wire-copy gospel. The papers reported that Owens had been “almost heartbroken” and that he had made a vow to Charles Riley: “Someday I’ll run that big lug right off the track.” A year before the 1936 Olympics, track writers were all too eager to depict America’s two best sprinters as engaged in a blood feud.