205 “they had foreseen”: “Olympic Games,” Time, Aug. 17, 1936.
Gender uncertainty was actually: “Olympic Games,” Time, Aug. 24, 1936.
206 “reviving charges Owens”: Davis J. Walsh, New York Journal, Aug. 4, 1936, p. 22.
“Boy, what a thrill”: International News Service, “Hitler Handshake after Victory Leaves Stephens Trembling,” New York Journal, Aug. 4, 1936.
207 “It is something”: Grantland Rice, “Jesse Owens, Woodruff Steal Show,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 5, 1936, p. A15.
At 4:30, in the round: Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 97.
208 “His eagerness to receive”: Daley, “U.S. Captures 4 Events.”
“If America didn’t have”: “Innuendo by Nazis Arouses Catholics,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 1936, p. 14.
209 “Tuesday was a dark”: Rice, “Jesse Owens, Woodruff Steal Show.”
210 “It begins to look”: Joe Williams: “Negro Stars Shine in Games, Give America Lead in Points, No More Hitler Greetings,” New York World-Telegram, Aug. 4, 1936, p. 22.
“I haven’t even thought”: Grantland Rice, The Tumult and the Shouting (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1963), p. 253.
210 “The crowning achievements”: “Nazi Insults to Negro Stars Condemned by Herndon,” Daily Worker, Aug. 12, 1936, p. 1.
211 “Hitler didn’t snub me”: United Press, “Snubbed by Roosevelt, Not Hitler, Says Owens,” Oct. 16, 1936.
“The games were overshadowed”: Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), p. 589.
“Everywhere the air was filled”: Ibid., p. 590.
“18. HE FLIES LIKE THE HINDENBURG”: DAY FOUR
214 “It is my pleasure”: Associated Press, “Gov. Daley of Ohio Cables Felicitations to Owens,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 1936, p. 27.
“Hitler declared Aryan supremacy”: Shirley Povich, “This Morning . . . ,” Washington Post, Aug. 5, 1936, p. X18.
“They are great”: “Owens Runs Like the Hindenburg Flies—Schmeling,” Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 15, 1936.
215 “America’s ‘athletes of bronze’”: Robert L. Vann, “Hitler Salutes Jesse Owens,” Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 8, 1936, p. 1.
“Though it can’t be”: Genet, “Berlin Letter,” The New Yorker, Aug. 15, 1936.
“I am proud”: Robert L. Vann, “Proud I’m an American, Owens Says,” Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 8, 1936, p. 1.
216 To be sure, Mack Robinson: Frank Litsky, “Mack Robinson, 85, Second to Owens in Berlin,” New York Times, Mar. 14, 2000, p. C30.
217 “[Owens] looked like a dark streak”: Grantland Rice, “Foreign Athletes Goggle-Eyed as Owens Achieves His Olympic Games ‘Triple,’” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 6, 1936, p. A11.
Tens of thousands of Germans: William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 101.
“If the Olympics clearly”: Frederick T. Birchall, “First Yacht Event Delayed by Storm; But Wind Moderates and Race Starts With Olympic Fire Burning on One Ship,” wireless to New York Times, Aug. 5, 1936, p. 25.
218 “Owens was black as tar”: Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 101.
“Incomparable,” he wrote: Alan Gould, “Owens, Carpenter, Meadows Break Records,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 6, 1936, p. A9.
“I told you”: Rice, “Foreign Athletes Goggle-Eyed.”
“I’m just getting the feel”: Associated Press, “Owens Would Race with U.S. Relay,” Washington Post, Aug. 6, 1936, p. X17.
19. THE RELAY
219 “Jesse Owens’s Olympics”: Joe Williams, “Jesse Owens Finishes Task; Other Nations Get Chance; British Receive Bad Shock,” New York World-Telegram, Aug. 6, 1936, p. 20.
“Owens has had enough glory”: Associated Press, “Owens Would Race with U.S. Relay,” Washington Post, Aug. 6, 1936, p. X17.
220 “Jesse, who hates to stand around”: Associated Press, “Owens Out of Relay,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 1936, p. 27,
“Ta king the 200-meter run”: John Kieran, “Sports of the Times: Three for the Streak,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 1936, p. 28.
“decided definitely tonight”: Associated Press, “Owens Named on 400-Meter Relay Team as Reports of German Strength Alarm Coaches,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 8, 1936, p. 15.
221 “their expected assignments”: Ibid.
222 By that time, everyone assumed: Associated Press, “Glickman Says Picking of Team ‘Cromwell’s Influence,’” Washington Post, Aug. 9, 1936, p. X1.
223 “Boys, this is a tough decision”: William O. Johnson, All That Glitters Is Not Gold: The Olympic Games (New York: Putnam, 1972), p. 179.
“I’ve got my medals”: Ibid., p. 180.
224 “Jesse is one of my best friends”: Ibid., p. 181.
“In justice”: J. P. Abramson, “Americans Equal Figures in 100-Meter Relay Test,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 9, 1936.
“Originally, it was definitely”: Ibid.
225 “The heralded Dutch and German”: Associated Press, “Morris Breaks Record as U.S. Sweeps Decathlon,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 9, 1936, p. A1.
“the nervous tension”: Associated Press, “Owens ‘Shaky’ as Mobs Clamor for Autographs,” New York Times, Aug. 9, 1936, p. S2.
226 “The heats failed to show”: Associated Press, “Glickman Says Picking of Team ‘Cromwell’s Influence.’” Even though Glickman and Stoller were denied their gold-medal opportunity, the Germans were forced to present Jewish athletes with fourteen medals, including nine that were gold. Thirteen different Jews won medals in Berlin; one, Endre Kabos of Hungary, a saber specialist, won two gold medals.
227 “I held out my hand”: Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), p. 196.
“strangely convoluted strokes”: Ibid., pp. 200–201.
228 “Owens lit out”: Paul Gallico, “Jap Captures Marathon,” New York Daily News, Aug. 10, 1936, p. 38.
“that the white boys”: Paul Gallico, A Farewell to Sport (New York: Knopf, 1938), p. 309.
229 “The 400-meter relay was the romp”: J. P. Abramson, “250,000 Watch Kitei Son, Corean, Capture Olympic Marathon for Japan in Record Time,” New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 10, 1936, p. 16.
EPILOGUE
230 “Did you see the games”: Joseph C. Nichols, “Schmeling Visits Joe Louis’s Camp,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1936, p. 15.
231 “I’m anxious to finish”: Associated Press, “Owens to Turn Pro If Offers Suit Him,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1936, p. 26.
Eddie Cantor: “Czar Brundage Suspends Owens,” New York Daily News, Aug. 17, 1936, p. 38.
“It would be foolish”: Associated Press, “Metcalfe Beats Jesse Owens in Exhibition Race,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 11, 1936, p. 22.
232 “I don’t know”: Associated Press, “Owens Dazzled by Many Offers,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1936, p. S2.
“We had no alternative”: “Owens Is Barred by AAU; Ready to Become a Pro,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 17, 1936, p. 19.
“Last Sunday,” he said: Associated Press, “Owens to Wait Until He Returns Home Before Making Decision on Pro Offers,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 1936, p. 23.
233 “There’s nothing I can”: Associated Press, “‘Unfair,’ Says Snyder,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 17, 1936, p. 19.
“It is pretty terrible”: Associated Press, “‘Scandalous,’ Says Jesse’s Ma,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 18, 1936, p. A10.
For three days: Donald McRae, Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (New York: Ecco, 2002), p. 169.
235 “My heart is telling me”: E-mail from Jorg Weck, archivist, German Sport and Olympic Museum, Cologne, May 11, 2005.
“I’ve seen Luz again”: Ibid.
Acknowledgments
Triumph could not have been written without benefit of the talents of the men who in the mid-1930s covered Jesse Owens, the Olympic boycott movement, and the games of the Eleventh Olympiad: Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, Westbrook Pegler,
Alan Gould, Braven Dyer, Arthur J. Daley, John Kieran, Bill Corum, Frederick T. Birchall, Al Laney, Jimmy Cannon, Joe Williams, Lewis Burton, Shirley Povich, Henry McLemore, R. Walter Merguson, Jesse Abramson, Fred Farrell, and William L. Shirer. Their colorful prose and courageous reporting painted a vivid picture of Owens and his time. While they have all died—as have many of the newspapers for which they wrote—some are well remembered, even legendary, but others are all but forgotten. They were all invaluable to me.
So were several anonymous reporters and columnists at the major black newspapers, whose names I do not know because their stories rarely carried bylines. To these writers at the Atlanta Daily World, the Cleveland Call and Post, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the Amsterdam News, I offer my thanks.
I am also deeply indebted to several other writers and historians. There is no better account of the life of Jesse Owens than Professor William J. Baker’s Jesse Owens: An American Life, from which I culled a tremendous amount of information. Owens’s three autobiographies, written with the assistance of Paul Nei-mark, were also fonts of anecdotes and recollections, as was William Oscar Johnson’s All That Glitters Is Not Gold. I repeatedly turned to several other sources: Donald McRae’s Heroes Without a Country; Richard Mandell’s The Nazi Olympics; Duff Hart-Davis’s Hitler’s Games: The 1936 Olympics; Cooper C. Graham’s Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia; Frank Deford’s profile of Leni Riefenstahl in Sports Illustrated; Larry Snyder’s article “My Boy Jesse” in the Saturday Evening Post; Leni Riefenstahl’s A Memoir and her film Olympia; David Wallechinsky’s The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics; Bud Greenspan’s documentary Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin; Grantland Rice’s The Tumult and the Shouting; Paul Gallico’s A Farewell to Sport; Susan D. Bachrach’s The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936; William L. Shirer’s The Nightmare Years, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Berlin Diary; Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again; Frederick Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics; Marty Glickman and Stan Isaacs’s The Fastest Kid on the Block; Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness; Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich; Robert Caro’s The Power Broker; Dick Schaap’s An Illustrated History of the Olympics; and The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson.
Also of enormous value to me were the archives of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Public Library, the New York Times, Time magazine, the Hearst syndicate, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as was the collection of the Museum of Television and Radio.
I have patched together many of the stories in the book from not one but several of the aforementioned sources. For instance, there are dozens of differing accounts of the events of August 4, 1936, when Luz Long made his unforgettable gesture of sportsmanship during the Olympic broad-jump competition. Arthur Daley’s version is slightly different from Paul Gallico’s, which is slightly different from Jesse Abramson’s. Additionally, Jesse Owens’s personal recollections are often at odds not only with the historical record but with each other. His account of the so-called Hitler snub, for example, changed frequently over the decades. In the interest of historical accuracy and narrative flow, I have relied on the versions of events offered by him and others that I found most credible.
Regarding dialogue, I have tried to use wherever possible the exact words recorded by the reporters who were writing them down as they were spoken. But on occasion I have, necessarily, taken some license in embellishing and editing the dialogue. I have endeavored to remain true to the essential facts and convictions of the men and women who grace these pages, and always I have done so only in service to the story.
This book owes its very existence to the brilliance of Susan Canavan, my editor at Houghton Mifflin. Her vision, dedication, and talent are unmatched. I stand in awe of her ability to fashion a book from my rambling prose—though I still think that Will Rogers deserved a few more paragraphs.
Scott Waxman, my literary agent, first attracted me to the idea of writing a book about Jesse Owens. He is the best at what he does, a tireless advocate and creative dynamo.
I am also grateful for the contributions of Martha Kennedy, who designed the stirring cover; Liz Duvall, the ever-exacting high priestess of red pencil, who cleaned up my sentences; Melissa Lotfy, who set those clean sentences into beautifully designed type; Laura Noorda, keeper of the schedule, who somehow managed to pull together this project on time despite my endless tinkering; Deborah DeLosa, Houghton Mifflin’s well-connected publicist; Sanj Kharbanda, the house marketing guru; Greg Payan, my diligent and keen-eyed photo researcher; and Sarah Gabert, the master of the notes.
I must also thank my dedicated researcher, the incomparable Joe Goldstein. He gathered source material everywhere from Cologne to Los Angeles, cashing in thousands of frequent-flier miles and innumerable markers with his contacts in the world of newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, Willie Weinbaum, my esteemed colleague at ESPN, lent his considerable talents to both the fact-gathering and the fact-checking process. His unerring eye for detail saved me from myself more than once. Dave Smith of the New York Public Library delved deep into that formidable institution’s recesses to locate obscure newspaper and magazine stories that enriched this book. He is an institution himself. Few people are better versed on the fine points of track and field in the 1930s than Marvin Rothenstein, whose expertise I abused. Similarly, Bill Mallon—surgeon, golfer, and Olympic historian—allowed me to tap his remarkable brain. Rebecca Aronauer and Marc Aronin, my trusty interns, gave me some of their finest hours, with no college credits to be gained. Tamar Chute of the Ohio State University archives provided valuable support, affording me access to the archives’ vast catalogue of Owens documentation. Ray Lumpp of the New York Athletic Club, Randy Harvey of the Los Angeles Times, Ryan Schiavo of ESPN, Professor Pam Laucella of Indiana University, Wayne Wilson of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, and Jorg Weck of the German Sport and Olympic Museum in Cologne generously shared their resources and time. Olympic champions John Woodruff and Harrison Dillard and Olympic bronze medalist Herb Douglas graciously submitted to interviews and spoke on the topic of their friend Jesse Owens. Kai Long spoke about the father he never got to know. Ralph Metcalfe, Jr., and Dave Wykoff were kind enough to discuss their fathers. Ira Berkow and Frank Litsky, two distinguished gentlemen of the New York Times, lent their memories and insights as well.
A special thanks is owed Gina Hemphill, Jesse Owens’s granddaughter, and the rest of the Owens family. Their support and generosity were crucial to this endeavor. My interactions with them over the years piqued my interest in the exploits of the family patriarch.
Thanks also to Will Vincent, Mike Lupica, Jimmy Breslin, Sandy Padwe, Farley Chase, Ellen Harilal, Dave Herscher, Vince Doria, Gare Joyce, Mark Moore, Sarah Starr, and Dave Zirin.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the influence of my father, Dick Schaap. He died in 2001, long before this book was conceived, but it never would have been written had he not nurtured my enthusiasm for all things Olympic. We were together at four Olympics, in Albertville, Barcelona, Lillehammer, and Atlanta. More would have been nice.
Index
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
A
AAU. See Amateur Athletic Union (AAU)
Abrahams, Harold, 85
Abramson, Jesse, 54, 180, 224, 229
Albritton, David
Hitler’s snub of, 192–95
Olympic games and, 173–75, 176, 179, 182
Owens’s friendship with, 110, 111, 143–44, 145, 157–58, 233
Owens’s Michigan records, 4, 10
Snyder and, 148, 184
Almeida, José de, 175
Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), 120, 230
boycott movement and, 64, 67–6
8, 70, 90, 91, 92–96
Brundage and, 64, 97
charges of professionalism and, 55, 57
Far Western championships (1935), 44–45
national championship (1935), 46, 47–48
Sullivan Award and, 102–3
suspension of Owens and, 232–33
American Jewish Congress, 67
American Olympic Committee (AOC), 87
boycott movement and, 72, 85, 87–88, 92–93, 96–97
Eleanor Holm Jarrett and, 143, 144–47, 168
Olympic exhibition tour and, 230–32
race and, 184–86
Snyder as Owens’s coach and, 147–49, 217
suspension of Owens by AAU and, 232–33
American Olympic team
coaching of, 114, 147–49
composition of, 127
flag dipping and, 165–67
German people and, 157, 165–67
segregation and, 131, 232–33
status of black athletes on, 184–86, 208–10
winter games and, 109–10
Amsterdam News (newspaper), 53–54
Anderson, George, 51
Ann Arbor, Michigan, Big Ten meet at (1935), 1–13, 31–32
anti-Semitism. See also boycott movement
in America, 84–85, 223, 226
in Nazi Germany, 65–72, 86–87, 153–54
AOC. See American Olympic Committee (AOC)
Associated Press (AP), 44, 59, 129, 225. See also Gould, Alan
athlete-of-the-year poll, 103
Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics Page 27