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

by Jeremy Schaap

  They and the rest of the crowd in Milwaukee were exceedingly disappointed when the Owens-Metcalfe showdown failed to materialize—Metcalfe pulled out to study for his law school exams at Marquette University. It is also quite possible that he was a little awed by Owens’s recent heroics and had no desire to be shown up in his own town. Despite his absence, those in attendance had little reason to complain. Skipping the hurdles, Owens won the 100- and 220-yard dashes and the broad jump, once again surpassing 26 feet. As Smith put it, “There was no doubt of his superiority.” Owens jumped 26 feet, 2½ inches—half a foot less than his leap in Ann Arbor, but still farther than any other human being had ever jumped. Once again the smoothness of his running style was impressive. With a typically weak start in the 220-yard dash, “he came into the stretch in fourth place. Then, almost effortlessly, he turned on the power.” He ran 21.8 without breathing hard. It must have occurred to Metcalfe as he pored over his constitutional law notes that it would be easier to ace his exams than to best Owens.

  That impression would be reinforced over the next two weeks, as Owens proved again and again that Ferry Field was no fluke and that the question in Berlin would be not whether he would win a gold medal but how many he would win.

  Two days after the Milwaukee meet, Snyder and Owens and nineteen other members of the Ohio State track-and-field team were in Clovis, New Mexico, en route to Los Angeles, where they would face Dean Cromwell’s formidable USC Trojans, featuring the sprinter Foy Draper. It was just the first stop on a prolonged swing through California that would culminate with the NCAA championships at the end of the month. For Snyder, it was a chance to show the western track powers that he had built a worthy program at Ohio State, and in particular to prove that his team could compete with Cromwell’s. At the time, the fifty-five-year-old Cromwell was to college track and field what Knute Rockne had been to college football. Bow-tied and fastidious, he had built a dynasty at USC that had produced Olympic champions in 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932. He had coached the great Charley Paddock. Snyder was eager to sic Jesse Owens on him.

  In Clovis, Owens and his teammates spent a few hours stretching their legs, running and jumping on a local track, shaking twenty hours of riding the rails out of their limbs. The next day they stopped at the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles—which was still a minor-league sporting town—Owens’s imminent arrival was treated as big news. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Bill Henry took to calling Owens “the Cleveland Cataclysm,” and each leg of the Buckeyes’ cross-country journey was dutifully detailed. Finally, on June 11, Ohio State pulled into Los Angeles, “under-cover of the semi-darkness that prevails at 6:30 A.M.” On the front page of that day’s Times, in an item titled “The Negro Wonder,” Harry Carr marveled at Owens’s athleticism and suggested that blacks, like American Indians, were going to continue to dominate whites in sports. “Perhaps the Indians are right,” he wrote. “They say that the world is coming to another Ice Age and the gods have selected certain races to survive the ordeal.”

  Owens had never before seen the West Coast and immediately took a liking to it. He loved the warm weather—in which it was so easy to get loose—and the sunshine. A few hours after stepping off the train and three days before the meet, he worked out at USC’s Bovard Field. The Times’s correspondent was impressed by his affability—he called him “a good-natured colored boy”—and physique. “Looks?” he wrote, “Well, Jesse is 5 feet 10¼ inches tall and weighs 164 pounds stripped. He has probably the most perfect pair of legs that anybody ever had but he is beautifully proportioned with a fine pair of shoulders and narrow hips. There’s nothing bulgy about him.”

  Several hundred gawkers showed up to see Owens and only Owens go through his training paces. The other athletes were “getting no attention.” Black Hollywood in particular was thrilled to have Owens in its neighborhood. “The local colored colony went into a spin when they heard that Jesse was coming here,” Bill Henry wrote. “They are prepared to just about turn the town over to him. And, come to think of it—why shouldn’t they?”

  Among those who crowded Owens for pictures and presented their hands for shaking was thirty-three-year-old Lincoln Perry—to Owens’s astonishment. The first major black film star, Perry was better known to the world as Stepin Fetchit. When practice was over, Perry took Owens with him to the set of Steamboat Bill, the movie he was making for Twentieth Century Fox. Owens was mesmerized by the scene at the soundstage. When he and Perry walked onto the set, John Ford, the director, was talking to his star, Will Rogers.

  “Well, look who Lincoln’s dragged in,” Rogers said, looking up from his script.

  Perry made the introductions. “Jesse Owens, Will Rogers,” he said. “And this is the boss, John Ford.”

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Owens said to both men.

  “I know you,” Rogers said in his Oklahoma twang. “I’ve been following you.”

  Owens was starstruck. Stepin Fetchit was impressive enough, but Will Rogers was one of the biggest men in America. A veteran of vaudeville, a featured player in the Ziegfeld Follies, he was by 1935, at the age of fifty-five, an accomplished actor, a famed humorist, and the nation’s preeminent social commentator. (He had been nominated for governor of Oklahoma, but declined to run.) To Rogers, though, Owens was the celebrity.

  Recalling his brief meeting with Owens in another of his letters to newspaper editors, Rogers wrote,

  Setting here on the running board of my car, about a hundred people around, we are all trying to make a movie to make the world laugh. Step and Fetchit [sic] just come up with Jesse Owens, the Cleveland colored boy of Ohio State, who breaks world’s records as easy as the rest of us break commandments. He is a very, very modest fellow. Says he will be tickled to death if he can just win these events here Saturday as he thinks these are the best boys he has met. He is entered in four events. He hold the world’s record in three of ’em and is tied for the other. Funny thing, on the picture with us is Jim Thorpe, our greatest all-around athlete of all time.

  It was true. Jim Thorpe was working on Steamboat Bill as an extra. In fact, Thorpe worked as an extra on seventeen films that were released in 1935, almost always playing a simple, noble Indian, a less offensive but no less facile stereotype than Stepin Fetchit’s Uncle Toms. History does not record whether Owens and Thorpe made each other’s acquaintance on June 12, 1935. It seems likely, though, that they did. Thorpe, like Rogers, was an Oklahoman, and it’s hard to imagine Rogers resisting the temptation to introduce his fellow Okie to the young star whose recent exploits he had so closely monitored.

  When Owens wasn’t hobnobbing with Perry, he was often out partying among the black elite. Snyder had always encouraged him to relax on the nights after he competed. “It was good for him to bust loose once in a while,” Snyder wrote in 1936. “He loved his Saturday nights. I used to tell him, ‘Put on your glad rags and get going. This is your night.’” In Los Angeles, Owens apparently had several enjoyable nights. He met a young woman named Quincella Nickerson, the daughter of a wealthy real estate broker who was one of the pillars of the black community. Beautiful and sophisticated, Nickerson escorted him around Los Angeles, showed him the finest shops, danced with him at the swank black nightclubs. Owens seemed unperturbed by the photographers, whose snapshots were soon reproduced in several of the black papers and of course came to the attention of Ruth. In his victory-induced euphoria, he was simply oblivious of the consequences of his actions. He felt bullet-proof—and as far from Cleveland and his obligations as could be.

  The day after he met Stepin Fetchit and Will Rogers—and dined at the Nickerson residence—Owens was back on the track, again training, as sportswriters sized him up and presented with scientific certitude their half-baked explanations for his greatness. “Short muscles in the calf of each leg, enabling him to get more leverage and hence greater spring, have helped to make Jesse Owens the greatest athlete in track and field history,” Braven Dyer wrote in the Los Angeles Times, whi
ch was covering Owens’s visit minute by minute. Dyer continued,

  The average human being has long muscles extending almost to the heel. Jesse’s muscles do not begin until halfway up his leg. The tendon is, therefore, abnormally long and the Negro star’s limbs are as shapely as those of a Follies girl. In fact, there is further evidence of the feminine touch about Owens, who, however, is an athlete of exceptional strength, in addition to speed. The boy’s skin is almost silky and he wears a small shoe, size 7½. His feet are neither flat nor abnormally large, as is the case with many Negroes and his heel does not jut out to any noticeable extent. One of Jesse’s great grandparents was white.

  The last point, oddly, was not expanded upon or ever suggested anywhere else.

  Clearly Owens’s performance in Ann Arbor had piqued the public’s curiosity, and the men of the press box were determined to quench it. As Owens posed for pictures and jogged around the track with Foy Draper, his future Olympic teammate, Snyder was asked why he was so good.

  “Nobody can answer that to the satisfaction of all concerned,” Snyder said, declining to attribute Owens’s talent to his race or physiology. “I know he has perfect rhythm. I know he is strong. I know he trains diligently and loves to run.” Snyder paused. Then he said, “Owens came to Ohio State a great athlete. It has been my job to keep him one.”

  After an exhausting week of interviews and introductions, Owens was not at his best at the Coliseum on June 15. He won the four events in which he competed—handily—but did not set any personal bests. Heeding the entreaties of Braven Dyer in the Times—“Don’t miss today’s appearance of Jesse Owens at the Coliseum. The boy is the athletic marvel of the age”—more than 40,000 fans watched as Owens took the 100- and 220-yard dashes, the 220-yard low hurdles, and the broad jump. But he did not push himself too hard. “He won so easily it was hard to believe what your eyes told you,” Bill Henry wrote. After Owens’s final victory, in the hurdles, a swarm came down from the stands to be near him, including two black girls. One, Muriel Foley, age eleven, had him sign a soda cup. The other was shooed away by the police before she could acquire an autograph. “Well, I got to touch him anyway,” she said.

  After the meet, Snyder told Owens to have some fun. As usual, Owens did what he was told.

  Frank Wykoff, whose 9.4 seconds for 100 yards was still the official world record—Owens’s time in Ann Arbor had not yet been certified—was among the throngs at the Coliseum. The former USC star and two-time Olympian was awed by what he saw and expressed what most who saw Owens expressed: disbelief at his effortless velocity. “I never saw a man run with such ease,” Wykoff said. “He doesn’t appear to be running fast at all. He isn’t half trying, yet he gets there first. Those strides of his are so short, and still it doesn’t appear that he moves his legs fast.”

  Wykoff was probably one of the few people at the Coliseum hoping Owens would not break the 100-yard record, but he knew that while his record had survived the day, its end was nigh. Owens, he could plainly see, was costing himself half a second, maybe more, at the gun. “I have to get my lead in the first forty yards of the race,” he said, “and then try and hold off my opponents. Owens appears too slow getting away now, but when he improves on that, look out, records.”

  Owens lingered in Los Angeles for several days. His next meet, the NCAA championships, at Berkeley, wouldn’t begin until the following Friday. He sensed that this meet would be different from the rest. So did Snyder. For once, victory was not assured. This meet would be a challenge, because Eulace Peacock would be there.

  Like Owens—and like Joe Louis—Eulace Peacock had been born in Alabama, in his case the town of Dothan, a metropolis compared to tiny Oakville. Eleven months younger than Owens, Peacock also made the great northward trek with his family. Instead of choosing the industrial Midwest, though, the Peacocks settled in Union, New Jersey, where Eulace’s father became a tar tester and Eulace did to the New Jersey state record book what Jesse did to Ohio’s. Like Jesse, Eulace was a sprinter and a broad jumper. Most remarkable, as a high school student in 1933, he set a state record in the broad jump that would last forty-four years (he leaped 24 feet, 4¼ inches).

  Taller and more muscular than Owens, Peacock was also more versatile. He was an excellent running back at Temple University in Philadelphia and an outstanding pentathlete. More than anything else, he relished competition. All world-class sprinters run better when they’re running against the best. Peacock was an entirely different—better—runner when he was charging down the track elbow to elbow with Jesse Owens. Which is not to say that he was anything less than brilliant in Owens’s absence.

  On April 27 in Philadelphia, at the venerable Penn Relays, Peacock had won both the 100-meter dash and the broad jump, essentially duplicating Owens’s simultaneous achievements at the equally venerable Drake Relays in Des Moines (Peacock’s 10.6 in the 100 meters was judged to be roughly equal to Owens’s 9.5 in the 100 yards). And on May 18, one week before the Big Ten meet at Ann Arbor, Peacock, competing in a dual meet against Villanova, ran 100 yards in 9.5 seconds, only one tenth of a second slower than Wykoff’s world record.

  Now, at the NCAA championships on June 22, Owens and Peacock would not have to compare their achievements telegraphically. They would face each other for the first time in the outdoor season. In the months since they had last raced against each other, Owens’s reputation had grown while Peacock’s had more or less plateaued, despite his wins in Philadelphia. (Compared to Owens, everyone seemed to be standing still.) Now Peacock would have the chance to prove that he too was worthy of the laurels that were being thrown at his rival, whom he had both defeated and lost to in the past.

  Snyder could see that Peacock, more than Metcalfe, was the greatest threat to Owens’s hopes of winning Olympic gold medals. He told Owens as much and impressed upon him the psychological importance of defeating Peacock whenever possible. “Don’t let him think he can beat you,” Snyder told Owens in Berkeley. “If he beats you now, he’ll know he can do it again. Don’t let that happen.”

  “Coach, nobody can beat me now,” Owens said. He could be boastful with Snyder, saying things he would never allow himself to say to the writers.

  In Berkeley, Owens reinforced the growing impression that he was a singular performer. He bested Peacock easily, winning the 100-yard dash, in which Peacock finished second, and the broad jump, in which Peacock finished fifth after having his best jump disallowed. Owens also won two events in which Peacock did not compete, the 220-yard dash and the 220-yard low hurdles. Perhaps most impressive, in the hurdles Owens defeated Glenn Hardin of Louisiana State. Racing in his worst event against Hardin, eventually the world-record holder and Olympic champion in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles, Owens won rather easily, despite his poor form—a photograph of the race shows him jumping several inches over a hurdle, almost as if he were high jumping—and his protestations to the contrary. “I feel fine,” Owens said after the meet, “but it sure felt good when that low hurdle race was over. The competition was mighty hot in all those events today and I’m mighty lucky to have been able to win the four I was in.” The Associated Press reported that Hardin “trailed Owens by a couple of yards.”

  As a team, Ohio State finished second, behind USC, with Owens scoring 40 of the Buckeyes’ 40.2 points. Eighteen thousand fans cheered Owens’s every move, which by now was invariably worthy of front-page treatment. “He beat just the pick of the country’s athletic stars in every event in which he appeared,” the Chicago Tribune reported on its front page. “From the time he won the hundred yard dash until he loped off the field after making a special effort to exceed the world’s broad jump record the throng’s plaudits were for Owens. No greater ovation has ever been accorded a visiting athlete.”

  Owens’s remarkable day at Berkeley made him “the superathlete of modern times,” according to the Associated Press, and no one cared to disagree. While Snyder was exhausted—the travel and the pressure had worn him down—Owens
celebrated by staying out all night dancing. “Jesse told me, ‘Don’t you worry about me, coach,’” Snyder told the press the day after the meet. “’You go to bed. Me, I’m going out and relax a little.’”

  Owens’s feet should have been aching and far from a dance floor, but since Ann Arbor he had felt nothing but elation, having tasted nothing but victory. Adrenaline was coursing through his veins, and there seemed no good reason to rest.

  On June 27, just a few days after the NCAA championships, Snyder and Owens were back in Southern California, in San Diego, for a less prestigious meet, the Far Western AAU championships. Still, Peacock and Draper would be there—and most of the winners from Berkeley. Owens decided not to run the obscure 150-yard dash—in which some had hoped he would break Charley Paddock’s world record—and concentrated on the 100-yard dash and the broad jump. Somehow Draper beat Owens in one of the heats for the 100-yard dash, but in the final, Owens reestablished the natural order. He finished first, just ahead of Peacock. “There were only nine inches between the two sepia speedsters,” one reporter noted, “but where Peacock was run out, Owens merely extended himself sufficiently to insure no other man hitting the tape ahead of him. There wasn’t the slightest semblance of effort on his part at any time.” At this point, Peacock had become nothing more than a foil for Owens, a rabbit, a pacesetter, less an adversary than a means for Owens to assess his superiority.

  The broad jump was even less challenging. Jumping twice, Owens reached only 24 feet, 5½ inches, which was still more than a foot farther than anyone else.

  Owens’s achievements were for the first time transcending sports. Suddenly he was more than just a sprinter. And he was more than just a celebrity. He was, in the parlance of his times, a credit to his race, as the Los Angeles Times suggested in an odd June 28 editorial titled “The Submerged Tenth”: