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

by Jeremy Schaap

  Jesse Owens, Negro college student, out-ran, out-hurdled, out-jumped the pick of white scholastic athletes of the country last week.

  Joe Louis, 21-year-old Negro, out-boxed, out-generaled and out-fought the former heavyweight white champion of the world [Primo Carnera].

  Paul Laurence Dunbar, Negro, charmed the world with his Mammy poems. George Garner is an outstanding tenor among the tenors of the country. The name of Booker T. Washington will live as long as education. The best fighters in the Spanish War were Negroes.

  [Negroes] are among the most loyal of all Americans. Most of them are quiet, unassuming, wholesome people. They have intelligence, stamina and courage.

  Uncle Sam can count on them.

  It was the first time Owens got top billing over Booker T. Washington.

  As much as he enjoyed his stardom, there were drawbacks. He had failed to realize that he was now fair game for the gossip columns, especially in the black press, which followed him closely. His prolonged flirtation with Quincella Nickerson was now a matter of public record. They had been seen together and photographed together, and it was reported that Jesse had proposed. “So important is this man,” the editor of the Cleveland Call and Post wrote, “that his love affairs have become front page news in the daily papers.”

  Naturally, Ruth Solomon wasn’t pleased to see the father of her daughter linked romantically to another woman—a wealthy, beautiful woman, no less—2000 miles from Cleveland. Hurt and humiliated, she fired off a missive to Jesse that arrived just as the meet in San Diego was ending. She threatened to sue him for breach of promise—for not honoring his promise to marry her—a relatively common legal action for scorned women in the 1930s. Even after he called her to assure her that the stories were untrue, Ruth told reporters that Jesse had “one last chance to explain himself” before she would file suit. Slowly it dawned on Jesse that he had caused Ruth much pain. Then it dawned on him that his indiscretion might cause him much pain.

  Their mission on the West Coast accomplished—three meets, eight events, eight victories, the elevation of Ohio State to the ranks of the national track-and-field powers—Snyder and Owens boarded a train for Lincoln, Nebraska, the site of the AAU’s national championship meet. In Lincoln, Ralph Metcalfe would be waiting. Despite all his recent successes, Owens still considered Metcalfe the standard to measure himself against. His victories had meant less to him because none of them had been won head-to-head with Metcalfe. It was clear to everyone else, though, that Metcalfe now had to prove that he could compete against Owens. “Possibly Ralph Metcalfe will beat Jesse to the tape in one or both sprint events in the national championships,” John Kieran wrote in the New York Times on June 30.

  But as the country unfolded before his eyes, Owens could barely focus on Metcalfe. Instead, he could not stop thinking of Ruth and the lecture he would undoubtedly receive when they next spoke.

  Amazingly, even Time magazine—which in those days barely acknowledged the existence of American blacks—addressed the Quincella question. “Fortnight ago [Owens] was reported engaged to one Quincella Nickerson of Los Angeles,” Time reported. Then the magazine quoted Owens, who ungallantly downplayed the relationship. “We were at a party and Miss Nickerson asked to see my fraternity pin,” Owens said. “I took it off and handed it to her, then stepped into another room for a minute. When I came back she was wearing it. Just before I left the West Coast I asked her for it. She cried a little but handed it over. I got out as fast as I could.” In Owens’s time, pinning a girl was essentially asking for her hand.

  For once, Owens wasn’t fast enough; the Nickerson controversy followed him all the way to Nebraska. He conceded that Quincella was lovely. “However,” he said, “how could I have become engaged to her? Why, there was never any sentimental discussion between us. I only knew her for three days and certainly one could not grow so serious in so short a time. At least I couldn’t. I’m not that sort of chap.” Owens’s statements also indicate that he was not, in fact, already married to Ruth, as he would sometimes later claim. If he had been, it would have been quite simple to refute the suggestion that he had proposed to Nickerson.

  In Lincoln, Owens’s adrenaline finally ran out. For weeks he had been feeling invincible, virtually weightless, but now, as he moved physically and chronologically closer to Cleveland, he was preoccupied with the Quincella controversy and deeply afraid that his hometown papers would report that he had had a daughter out of wedlock. Sensing that his mind and his body were exhausted, he decided to skip the hurdles and 200-meter dash and compete in only the 100-meter dash and broad jump.

  It was the Fourth of July and the heat was oppressive, but still 15,000 fans filed into Memorial Stadium to see the great Owens square off against the great Ralph Metcalfe in the 100 meters. Metcalfe was still considered the world’s fastest human, but Owens, of course, based on his recent performances, was considered nearly his equal. In the final, Owens crouched into his set position eleven times, and eleven times someone jumped the gun—including Owens, twice. (Under today’s rules, he would have been disqualified.) His ability to concentrate had been compromised by his personal issues. The fine rhythm he had displayed in race after race for more than a month was gone. He felt uneasy. Finally, on their twelfth try, the 100-meter finalists were off. To the astonishment of the crowd, Jesse Owens could not keep up. Eulace Peacock ran the distance in 10.2 seconds—a world record if not for the strength of the tailwind—and Ralph Metcalfe, who had dreamed the night before that he would finish third, finished second. Distracted and morose, Owens settled for third.

  Snyder hated to see Owens lose; he especially hated to see him lose to Peacock and Metcalfe at an important championship. “Look,” he said to Owens after the race, “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but this is what matters now. You have to concentrate. You cannot let Peacock or Metcalfe think you are vulnerable. Never!”

  “I’m just tired, Larry,” Owens said, staring at his shoes. He said “Larry” only when he was down.

  “Well, get it together,” Snyder said, declining to object to what he knew was a lie. “You can’t rest on your laurels. Not now. Get it together for the broad jump.”

  In the broad jump, Peacock jumped 26 feet, 3 inches, the best jump of his life, and Owens jumped 26 feet, 2¼ inches—a remarkable effort considering his state of mind, but still too short. Head to head against Eulace Peacock, Owens had gone 0–2. Nobody was supposed to outsprint or outjump Jesse Owens, and Peacock had done both.

  “This was to have been Owens’s show,” Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times, “and Peacock took the play right away from him. The meet was built around the Ohio State flash and not a championship did he take.”

  In the Los Angeles Times, in a note under the unfortunate heading, “Enter Mistah Owens, Exit Mistah Peacock,” Braven Dyer wrote, “Peacock, like Owens, is only a sophomore and has his best years ahead of him. He is stronger physically than Jesse.”

  “What’s wrong, Jesse?” Snyder asked after the broad jump.

  “What’s wrong?” Owens said, a bit defensively. “I just jumped more than twenty-six feet. Good enough for a world record. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Jesse,” Snyder said, “I know something’s bothering you. What’s the situation at home? How’s Ruth?”

  “It’s fine, coach, no problem.” Owens slid from defensiveness to obstreperousness. “Everybody’s spending too much time reading the papers,” he said. “Ruth and me are just fine. Just fine.”

  Snyder was weary of these evasions. “Now, Jesse, I know you’re tired,” he said, “but there’s no way you should be finishing third in any race, against anyone. Whatever’s going on between you and Ruth is your business, but you better get it sorted out. You’re not going to win any races with your mind stuck on your troubles.”

  “Okay, coach, I understand.”

  Since the day they had met, Snyder had made Owens acutely aware of how much was at stake every time he competed—nothing less t
han his education and his livelihood. For the Frank Wykoffs and Foy Drapers of the world—Jesse’s white rivals—amateur athletics could remain just that: amateur. For Ralph Metcalfe, too, track was not everything. He was book-smart and a natural politician. Owens was neither and knew it.

  Snyder’s lecture in Lincoln made an impact. Owens knew that to win at the highest level, to qualify for and triumph at the Olympics, he would have to dedicate himself body and soul to the track. There could be no distractions. No more nights out on the town. No Quincellas. Berlin was just thirteen months away. Nothing else mattered. It was time to get serious.

  “You’ve got two things ahead of you this [coming] year,” Snyder said. “Randall’s Island [the site of the Olympic track-and-field trials] and Berlin. And they’re bigger than your Saturday nights.” Of course, he was contradicting himself. He had always encouraged Owens to decompress after expending himself physically. But the situation had changed. Snyder did not fear the toll that partying would take on Owens’s body. He did not fear the alcohol or the hard wood of the dance floors. Suddenly, in the wake of the Nickerson episode, he feared the girls.

  At 5:40 P.M. on July 5, 1935, Owens arrived at Union Terminal in Cleveland, but Ruth wasn’t there to meet him. As he hurried home to change, she was hurrying to the station. Finally they found each other.

  “Well, Ruth, are we getting married tonight?” Jesse asked.

  “If you got the ring,” she replied.

  A romantic Jesse was not—nor was he in possession of a ring. But he located one, and within a few minutes a license clerk named Frank Zizelman was summoned from his dinner table. The suddenly eager couple then called on Nelson Brewer, a probate judge, to waive the mandatory five-day waiting period between the filing of a certificate and the actual taking of vows. The Reverend M. S. Washington, Ruth’s preferred minister, could not be found, but the Reverend Ernest Hall offered to perform the ceremony—as soon as choir practice was over. When the singing ended, the vows were exchanged. In addition to their friends and relatives, the Cleveland Call and Post, a black weekly, congratulated the couple. “Minnie Ruth Solomon won the Cupid’s Sweepstakes, walking off with the prize, a yearling, one Jesse Owens,” the paper reported. “Quincella of the Los Angeles Nickersons finished out of the money. A baseball scorer would be forced to credit the California lass with an assist, for she certainly helped no end in Jesse making up his mind to enter the Matrimonial Derby.”

  A less delicate Associated Press report appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “The wedding set at rest reports Miss Solomon might sue Owens for breach of promise because he was ‘going around with’ a wealthy Negro society girl in Los Angeles when he was there two weeks ago.”

  Regardless of the circumstances, Jesse and Ruth were dazzling in their wedding finery. In a wire photo, they can be seen smiling broadly, the Reverend Hall towering over them both, looking slightly disheveled.

  The honeymoon was brief. Jesse was up at dawn on July 6 to catch a train to Crystal Beach, Ontario, where that afternoon he would again face off with Eulace Peacock in a 100-meter dash. This time he surged to the lead, but with about 20 meters to the finish line, Peacock passed him, banging elbows, and outsprinted him for the win. Clearly Owens was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and was relatively easy prey for Peacock, who nevertheless was staking a serious claim to the title of world’s fastest human.

  The Ontario meet took place on Saturday. On Tuesday, Owens and Peacock would race again, at 100 yards, at New York University’s Ohio Field in the Bronx. Proving the fickleness of the media, a small item in the New York Times noted that Peacock would race but did not so much as mention Owens, who just a fortnight earlier was being hailed as the greatest trackman ever. After consecutive losses to the imposing Peacock, Owens’s aura of invincibility had evaporated—as had the sense that he and he alone embodied America’s Olympic hopes.

  Racing under a darkening sky in the summer twilight, on a track made slow by incessant rain, Peacock and Owens took their marks alongside USC’s Draper, Edward O’Sullivan of the New York Curb Exchange, and George Anderson of San Francisco’s Olympic Club. There were several false starts before the field broke clean, with Peacock, in lane two, zipping into the lead. At the 50-yard mark, Owens, in lane four, was at least a full stride behind. “Then,” Arthur Daley wrote in the Times, “Owens began to move with that catlike smoothness of his that is so deceptively fast. On he came and up he came, closer and closer to the highstriding Easterner. He was at Peacock’s shoulder ten yards from the red worsted, and only six inches, or less, separated the two at the tape.”

  Peacock had won again—his third victory over Owens in the sprint in six days. Unaccustomed to defeat, Owens struggled with the loser’s protocol. He did not know when and how to congratulate Peacock, so he simply watched as the writers and the other runners came up to slap Peacock on the back. Owens liked Eulace—liked him enough, anyway—but he was not quite up to the task of feigning graciousness. This was not the lawn tennis club. This was business. Regardless of what he might say, his body language gave him away. He tried to hold his head high but couldn’t. He slouched and shuffled away from Peacock and the reporters. At least he was comforted by the knowledge that he was truly exhausted. The trains, the turmoil, the wedding—all of it had sapped the strength from his legs.

  The syndicated columnist Paul Gallico was in the Bronx that afternoon, braving the elements to catch a glimpse of Owens and Peacock. “It looked to me as though Owens was getting faster as the finish came closer,” he wrote, “and in another step would have passed and beaten Peacock. However, by that time he had run out of cinder track and the race was over.” As Peacock and Owens crossed the finish line at virtually the same time, Peacock’s massive legs seemed to dwarf Owens’s. Next to Eulace, Jesse was slight.

  Finally, though, in the broad jump, Owens righted himself. He jumped only 23 feet, 9 inches—the track was essentially mud—but Peacock could do no better than 23 feet, 6½ inches.

  When the meet was over, Owens told a radio reporter that he was fatigued and not in his best form. The reporter asked for specifics. “I just mean I’m tired,” Owens said, pulling his scarlet Ohio State sweatshirt over his head. “I’ve been doing a lot of running and I’m tired of it. I mean, just like when you’ve been announcing for a long time, your voice gets tired.”

  His victory in the broad jump meant Owens’s losing streak was over, but the sprints were what truly mattered, and on that front his abilities were being reconsidered. Even Charley Paddock, the Olympic champion who had inspired Owens as a youngster to pursue track, was suddenly a Eulace Peacock fan. “I can only see Peacock as a certain performer at the games in Berlin,” Paddock told the Los Angeles Times after the race in the Bronx. “I’m afraid Metcalfe can’t hold up another year, what with that bad leg, and I can’t help feeling that Owens is pretty much burned out. If Owens were to specialize on the 220-yard dash next year,” he continued, “and leave the 100 and the low hurdles alone, he still might figure. Certainly he can’t continue to run in three events and broad jump besides and hope to make the grade. As for the short dash, the Ohio State boy is far too slow off the marks to do much good in the 100.”

  Paddock’s comments were reprinted around the country, stinging Owens. More ominously, Lawson Robertson, the University of Pennsylvania track coach who would lead the U.S. track team in Berlin, said, “Peacock is the fastest and most consistent of all our sprinters. He also has a better finish than Owens.”

  Robertson had had many opportunities to see Peacock race in the flesh—in Philadelphia, home to both Penn and Temple—and had long ago determined that he preferred Peacock to Owens. Owens and Snyder believed, probably correctly, that Robertson was biased in favor of East Coast athletes and Paddock in favor of those from the West Coast.

  The criticisms sent Owens to the phone box to dial up Snyder, who had remained in Ohio, seeking reinforcement. “So Paddock thinks I can’t start and Robertson says I can’t finish,”
he said, his voice crackling on the long-distance connection.

  “You ‘re just tired, Jesse,” Snyder said, recognizing that this was a time to soothe and encourage his protégé, not to castigate him. “You just need a break.”

  “I know, coach, I do,” Owens said, holding back tears of frustration and anxiety.

  “Trust me, Jesse,” Snyder said, “this is nothing. Peacock won’t be able to touch you when you’re rested.”

  But Owens couldn’t help feeling unsure of himself and his ability.

  In his comments to the press, he naturally emphasized his fatigue—but he also revealed a measure of self-doubt. “Of course I’m worn down,” he told the estimable John Lardner. “I’ve been doing a lot of running this summer. I need to lay off now and take a little rest. But Eulace is a great runner—and a very good jumper. This boy has been right behind me for quite a while. It looks as though he’s more than caught up now.”

  In an interview with the Amsterdam News, the newspaper of Harlem, Owens said, “It’s going to take a special man to defeat Eulace Peacock. You see, I’ve already reached my peak. Peacock is just now reaching his. He’s a real athlete. I don’t know whether I can defeat him again.”

  If Owens was losing some of his confidence, at least Gallico was still a fan. His column the day after the Bronx meet ran under the headline “Give Owens a Rest, He’ll Beat Peacock in the Dash.” “If both men were at their best and fresh,” Gallico wrote, “I think I should pick Owens to take Peacock in the hundred. Don’t know why, particularly because Peacock has a much stronger build and seems to be more powerful all around. But Owens strikes me as more of a greyhound, and capable of a greater nervous effort over the 100-yard stretch.”

  Owens’s “nervous” energy was a favorite topic of sportswriters. It was widely assumed that he was high-strung, like a greyhound or a thoroughbred, and that this quality helped make him great. Snyder said Owens had “a high tension nervous system.” He did. But it was once said, accurately, that “even though he churned within, he remained outwardly calm.”