On July 20, 1968, at 7:15 a.m., buses lined up outside the La Salle Hotel to carry the athletes to Soldier Field. There was a press conference scheduled for 9:00 a.m., and the Opening Ceremony would commence at 10:30. The immense stadium was largely empty, as expected, but athletes and volunteers streamed in—volunteers from the Jaycees, Caritas, the Saturday Afternoon Club, Clipped Wings, the Chicago Park District, and the Chicago Kennedy Campaign Workers. Gary Irwin, a local gymnast, was there. He’d signed up to serve as the trampoline teacher. There were members of the Chicago Blackhawks and Toronto Maple Leafs, as well as the entire Notre Dame football team, on hand to help with sports clinics. For entertainment, there were, among others, musicians from the Great Lakes Naval Station, St. Rita High School, the Chicago Fire Department’s clown band, and Connecticut’s Mansfield Training School.
One of the most recognizable athletes in the world was at Soldier Field that morning, too: the Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson. Johnson had traveled his own journey of change to get to Chicago: his childhood had been spent in a segregated town in Texas, where he’d grown up on the other side of the color line. “I went to an all-black school, I rode on the back of the bus, I sat in the colored section of the movie theater, I went to a bathroom marked ‘colored’ and I drank from a water fountain marked ‘colored’ too.” But at the age of nine, he and his family moved to California, to a town where they were the only people of color. There was no segregation. The shift was profound.
“California turned my world upside down.” Almost miraculously, Johnson felt no discrimination in his new home. “I went to a mixed school and saw all these people treating me like I was one of them and I thought to myself, ‘I never knew any of this could even exist.’” He was a leader in his high school. He was elected president of his class and went on to attend UCLA, where for the first time he decided to try track and field. He competed in his first decathlon as a freshman in 1954, and just months later broke the world record. It was his fourth competition. By 1958, he was Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. Two years later, he won an Olympic gold medal in Rome after a dramatic finish against his biggest competitor, Yang Chuan-kwang of Taiwan, who had been a classmate at UCLA.
After his gold medal, Johnson retired from sports and became a film star, a sports announcer, and a global celebrity. “But somewhere in my soul,” he said, “all the opposition to people of color, all the sense of amazement I had when I realized that there was a world that I didn’t know existed … it had an impact on me. I came from one society to another. I saw the world change right in front of my eyes. So I knew it could happen.”
He was invited by President Kennedy to participate in the 1961 inaugural celebration, and there he met the president’s sister Eunice—and his brother Bobby, who mesmerized Johnson. “I just loved Bobby. He was the most amazing man I’d ever met.”
For years after meeting Robert Kennedy, Johnson was on call to him, traveling with him, visiting him and his family, joining his mission to change the politics of the nation. And then, just five weeks before the first Special Olympics, Rafer was with Bobby Kennedy when he lost his life in Los Angeles. Along with the NFL great Roosevelt Grier, Rafer Johnson tackled the murderer and seized his weapon. Johnson held on to the gun that killed my uncle until the police came to take it. The experience devastated him. “I got lost. I went home and built a seven-foot-high wall around my house. I didn’t come out. I couldn’t come out. I didn’t have anything to live for.”
Bobby Kennedy had spoken not just to Rafer Johnson’s politics but to his heart. And with Bobby’s death, Rafer’s heart was broken. He couldn’t imagine a future that mattered or a reason to live the one he had. There were millions like him in the United States in 1968, one of the stormiest years in our nation’s history. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in April, the war in Southeast Asia dragged on, and people were disgusted by their political institutions and leaders at home. The center was unraveling. And Rafer, enclosed in his house and behind his wall, couldn’t imagine a way forward.
But he did answer the phone one day to hear an invitation he would have been embarrassed to refuse: “Will you come to Chicago?” my mother asked. Amazingly, despite the horrific situation surrounding her brother’s death, she had decided to proceed with the games. Years later, when a close friend of mine died, she gave me the advice that must’ve animated her decision: “Just keep going. There’s no point in sitting around. That’s what my dad always told me. ‘Just keep going.’”
Rafer didn’t really know what it was about, but after more than a month holed up in his house, he decided he would force himself to try. “I had no expectations. I had only just enough energy to say ‘yes’ and show up.”
On the morning of July 20, a group assembled for the 9:00 a.m. press conference. It had been planned at the last minute because my mother wanted to go public with long-range plans for the still-nascent Special Olympics organization. “I wish to announce a national Special Olympics training program for all mentally retarded children everywhere,” she told the reporters.
Anne Burke wasn’t there. On the way to the stadium, my mother had asked Burke a favor. “Could you go to Sears and pick me up a bathing suit, so I can get in the pool with the swimmers?”
“Of course, I was shocked,” said Burke. “I mean, she was the sister of the late president of the United States, and she’d flown in from Washington, DC, to give the opening speech, and she was hosting the mayor and all that. But she wanted a bathing suit! So I got her a suit.”
Eventually the moment arrived and the games began. Following the ancient Olympic tradition, athletes paraded into the stadium as an announcer introduced each group according to the institution or state from which they’d come. The bands played marching tunes and flourishes. Seventeen-year-old Philip Weber carried the Olympic torch and lit the forty-foot-high cauldron. The fire was called the John F. Kennedy Flame of Hope. McFetridge gave a speech; other city officials did as well. And, from a microphone just above the field level, my mother gave her first Opening Ceremony speech.
She challenged listeners to imagine a future Special Olympics program that would grow from the thousand athletes assembled on Soldier Field that day to include more than 1,500,000 athletes “who should be competing in games like this all over America.” She compared the special athletes with Roman gladiators who fought life-or-death battles against predatory lions. She imagined those gladiators going into their battles, facing the real likelihood of death. She imagined that they might have had a sacred oath: “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” She challenged the athletes of the first Special Olympics to compete with this oath just as if they, too, were facing life or death. And she finished simply with the words “Let us begin the Olympics.”
“Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” She told me years later that she wrote those words in her hotel that morning, or perhaps on the way to the stadium. Her longtime public relations assistant, Herb Kramer, told me that he had drafted them for her earlier that day. One thing is certain: they were spoken from her core. They were aspirational words, but they were also gut-wrenching ones that framed the challenge starkly: for each individual on that field, there was a real danger that the predatory lions of life would defeat them. In the face of this adversity, there was but one calling: be brave. Even if they might not mount the winner’s stand of life, they could be brave. Bravery was its own reward. And when it came to bravery, these athletes could not be outdone. They had no disability when it came to bravery.
With the end of the speeches and declarations, the athletes were led to their respective contests—some to the pool, some to the high jump, some to the starting line of the 50-yard or 300-yard dash. And there, on the field and in the largely empty stands of Soldier Field, the spirit of Special Olympics was born.
* * *
As luck would have it, Marty Sheets fell ill that morning and had to stay behind in his hotel room, b
ut his coach, Frank Starling, wandered around the infield in disbelief. “It’s not easy to run a multisport track meet, especially with almost a thousand athletes. But there were volunteers everywhere and everything had been planned perfectly, and I just couldn’t believe the whole scene. These athletes were treated like world-class competitors, and so was I.”
Rafer Johnson went from station to station—from the pool, to the high jump, to the starting line of the 50-yard and 300-yard dashes—caught between tears and wide-eyed amazement. “Everywhere you turned, you saw an experience no one had ever seen before. No one had seen these people. No one had ever seen their exhilaration. It was so simple, but it was so amazing.” He could almost feel his life change: “I looked at the athletes, and I knew what it was like for them. I knew how it felt when someone slapped me on the back for the first time. The athletes had these smiles that I will never be able to describe. And when I went to congratulate them, I got a bear hug instead of a handshake.” Not a man given to excessive emotion, Rafer put it simply: “Something came from inside me. I just wanted to say over and over again: thank you.”
There were many races that day, but one in particular stood out from the rest. It has been described so many times since then that it has become like an ancient tale from an oral tradition—told and retold with ever new versions and ever different characters. It enjoys periodic bursts of popularity on the Internet when it is rediscovered and “liked” many thousands of times. From what I have been told, this is what happened.
At the start of the 300-yard dash, a group of about seven athletes was led to the starting line. Like all the other athletes at the games, they’d been placed in a heat against others of similar ability. Their race would be once around the track. First-, second-, and third-place finishers would win gold, silver, and bronze medals respectively. Those who finished lower than third would receive participation ribbons. Like every other race during the games, this one was a “finals” of sorts. There was no elimination round, no second race for finalists, no additional rung up the ladder for the racers to climb. This was their one and only race.
Their names have been lost over time, but by all accounts, the runners were evenly matched. They sprinted the first hundred or so yards, mostly keeping pace with one another. As they took the outside turn, one runner started to pull away and grabbed the lead. They continued down the back stretch bunched together but with a clear leader. Volunteers who were assembled around the perimeter of the track cheered them as they came to the final turn. They were close enough to hear and see one another; close enough to push one another to dig deeper for that little bit of extra energy; close enough to know that the final hundred yards would determine the winner.
And down that final hundred yards they came, the leader now commanding his position, flanked by the other six runners, who were trailing but not giving up. It was all adrenaline now. The finish line was in sight; the cheering grew louder; their energy was fading and surging at the same time.
And then the runner in second place leaned too far forward and fell hard into the track. He let out a painful grunt followed by a sprawling fall, legs overhead, tumbling into the hard surface of the track. And then, the runner in first, by now just a few yards short of the winning finish, stopped. It was his friend who had fallen. He turned around as the other runners sped by him and raced backward to his friend, who was lying on the track. He bent over and lifted the fallen runner, who stood, limped a step, and then put his arm over his friend’s shoulder. The two of them walked together toward the finish line and crossed it arm in arm in last place.
I can hear the hush and the cheers of that moment. I can see the wonder of the volunteers, the officials, the onlookers. And I hear a mystic’s riddle, as simple as it is impossible to answer: Who won that race?
To this day, no one remembers who was given the gold medal for the race, but everyone knows that on that track the two athletes who crossed the line last offered a new vision of what it means to win. And it wasn’t just those two, either. All over Soldier Field, children of scorn and lonely teenagers tried their best and won. People who had so little to give gave the one thing they had: their hearts. And those around them were given a chance to unleash their spirits, too, by cheering them on, by watching their bravery come to life, by meeting their smiles with eyes opened to loveliness. On that day, winning had nothing to do with beating anyone and everything to do with playing like no one is judging even though everyone is watching. Sports had never seen anything like it. No one had.
“Those at the edge of any system and those excluded from any system,” writes the spiritual master Richard Rohr, “ironically and invariably hold the secret for the conversion and wholeness of that very group.” On July 20, 1968, for the first time in history, people with intellectual disabilities were celebrated as great individuals by others who discovered their gifts in the joy of sports. Gifts! The idea of Olympic triumph, of winning, of bravery, of being gifted—none of these qualities had ever been conferred on these human beings. But on the first day, there was something in their persistence, something in their emotional tenderness, in their uninhibited openness to others that burst to life and awakened those who could see to a different way of defining what it means to win. They won from within. For those who had eyes to see, it was an awakening.
The Chicago Special Olympics was a classroom of the heart. The whole unstated purpose was everywhere in plain sight: each competitor was celebrated as being more beautiful and valuable than anyone dared imagine. No one had anticipated this.
Before leaving the stadium, Mayor Richard Daley turned to my mother and said, “Eunice, the world will never be the same.” He couldn’t have imagined how true time would prove his words to be. Later that night, even though he had not been able to play in the arena that day, Marty Sheets willed himself out of bed and went to the banquet celebrating the games. For whatever reason, my mother tracked him down. She was speaking from the podium with a spotlight on her when she stepped off the stage and into the crowd. She worked her way through the dozens of tables where athletes, celebrities, coaches, and dignitaries sat and found Marty, and with the spotlight still shining, asked him to stand.
“I understand you trained to come to the games but you got sick,” she said in front of a thousand people. Marty was stunned to be standing with all eyes on him. He didn’t say a word. His coach fidgeted. “Well, Marty, for your guts and for your effort, I want you to have a gold medal, too. Here you go. Marty Sheets is the winner of the Special Olympics gold medal for bravery.”
She could have spoken those words to herself. She could have been giving that medal to her own sister or to millions of others around the world awaiting their chance. Soon enough, she would be able to do both.
SEVEN
As Simple as Possible
What you are looking for is what is looking.
—attributed to Saint Francis
In 1968, there was no way I could learn how to win from within or, for that matter, understand how to live fully alive, either. Special Olympics was ready to teach, but I wasn’t ready to learn. After all, I hadn’t learned that it was possible to see from within, so how could I have seen or learned the secrets of the heart that were all over Soldier Field? It took me another fifteen years to begin to get it.
But a few years after the games, one change did capture my attention: Rosemary became a frequent visitor at our home for the first time. With Special Olympics a public success and with an ambitious vision for growing it, my mother must have felt empowered to welcome her own sister more openly into our lives. So Rosemary began arriving regularly at our home with a dedicated nun traveling with her and a guest room all prepared for her visit. She would stay for a week or two, and she became a part of our family routines. In warm weather, she would swim with us after school. Even if the air had a chill, my mother would insist that Rosemary get into the pool: “Come on, Rosie. Get your fanny in the pool!” During colder days, she would take walks around the field
s or rides into town. She would sit with us at dinner and listen to the rousing conversations. Years later, my mother would deliver her most remembered speech at the Opening Ceremony of the 1987 Special Olympics Summer Games at Notre Dame University, when she ferociously asserted, “The years of segregation and separation are over!” In our home, the years of segregation and separation ended with the arrival of Rosemary.
At the same time, my mother emerged as an increasingly public figure as her “games” started to break through into the national consciousness. From a sports point of view, the founding genius of Special Olympics was its embrace of “divisioning,” a process by which every competitor, regardless of ability level, is placed in a competitive heat and given a realistic chance to win a medal. Divisioning made it possible for every athlete to have a chance to experience the joy of victory, thus forever banishing the idea that sports could reward only the elite few who triumphed over all. But the practice also brought another, equally powerful concept to the public at large, and it was this: everyone can succeed if they marshal the bravery to try. The organization was sharpening its most powerful message: winning isn’t about being the best—it’s about doing your best.
The power of this new venture in the world of sports was not lost on the media and marketing leaders of the world. In 1973, the leading sports show in the world, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, featured the first-ever nationally televised segment on Special Olympics alongside the usual sampling of elite sports competitions from around the world. The fabled producer of the show, Roone Arledge, made the unilateral decision to devote a fifteen-minute segment to the games being held that year at UCLA, hosted by Frank Gifford. Even though the games were relatively small, they were already attracting the attention of such corporate brand powerhouses as Coca-Cola, which outfitted volunteers and sent hundreds of volunteers from their own workforce to local events.
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