THE OLYMPIC ideal was of pure athletic competition separated from the ideologies and international disputes of the modern world. But that was an impossible notion, and there was no pretense of separating sports and politics in the first dual track-and-field meet involving the two superpowers of the cold war era. Sports officials first broached the subject during an informal summit meeting at the Soviet quarters in Melbourne at the 1956 Olympics. A long night of food, drinks, and conversation about future head-to-head competitions ended with a firm handshake between team leaders Daniel Ferris of the U.S. and Russian Leonid Khomenkov. But the reality could not take shape without political diplomacy, and that came later, on January 27, 1958, when Soviet ambassador Georgi Zaroubin and U.S. ambassador S. B. Lacy concluded three months of negotiations by signing the US-USSR Exchange Agreement. After icy relations for so many years, with little cultural contact between the two nations, finally there would be regular exchanges in industry, agriculture, medicine, music, art, film, theater, and athletics.
The home and away exchange pattern had been arranged in sports even before the pact was officially signed. In the first year, ice hockey and basketball teams would play in Russia, while wrestlers and weight lifters competed in the U.S.—all culminating with a titanic track-and-field meet at Lenin Stadium in Moscow in late July. Both governments praised the agreement. The newspaper Pravda welcomed it as “part of the principle of peaceful coexistence,” and Soviet Olympic officials were quoted in Izvestia saying that the sports teams had “a lot to learn from each other.” The only vocal opposition came from right-wing critics in the U.S. who denounced any accommodation of the Communists. In response, the State Department argued that the exchanges could only help the image of the United States, which, as one internal memo stated, “had been distorted beyond any pretense of accuracy” by Soviet propaganda. One of the most troubling images had to do with race, America in black and white.
By the time the roster of the U.S. track team was set at the national championships in early July, there were few signs of a cold war thaw. No sooner had David Edstrom, a young decathlete from the University of Oregon, made the team than he began to wonder what was in store. Leafing through a New York newspaper, Edstrom saw photos of a Russian mob outside the West German embassy on Moscow’s Bolshoya Gruzinskaya Street pelting the building with slabs of concrete and splattering the walls with bottles of purple ink. Two days later the papers showed a similar crowd gathered at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, waving placards and denouncing America as a land of fascist dogs. Both rallies were carefully directed by Soviet officials—a bit of propagandistic stagecraft meant to counterbalance earlier demonstrations in Bonn and New York protesting the recent execution by hanging of former Hungarian leaders Imre Nagy and General Pal Maleter. Nagy and Maleter had become martyrs in the West: Communists who had turned against their Soviet overseers to help lead the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
All of this was strange and unsettling to Edstrom, who, like his teammates, had never been to the Soviet Union. “I thought, What is going on there?” he recalled. “It was kind of scary thinking about going over. I didn’t know what to expect.”
American officials were more concerned about the prospects of the track meet itself, how the results might be used by them—or, to their minds, misused by the Soviets—for propaganda purposes. Here the ironies of different concepts of equality came into play. Following a long-standing tradition among European nations, the host Russians declared that the point totals of men and women would be counted together to determine a winner. U.S. officials feared that their women, considered inferior to their Soviet counterparts, would drag them to defeat, and wanted to split men and women into separate competitions. This was the norm in the States, where the role of women was so minimized that Track & Field News, the bible of the sport, did not even cover the women’s championships in Morristown. Renewed negotiations got so sticky that one day, as Temple was putting his team through twice-a-day drills at a high school track in New Jersey, where it had set up training camp awaiting the overseas trip, Kaszubski approached him with grim news. “Ed,” she said, “we might not go on this tour to Russia.” Another form of segregation, Temple thought. Maybe he wouldn’t need that big suitcase after all.
In the end, after keeping the women’s team in limbo for a few days, U.S. officials concluded that they would look foolish refusing to participate because of the gender issue. Among other things, that would provide the Soviets with more rhetorical ammunition, reinforcing their accusations that under capitalism many athletes were treated like second-class citizens. As the Soviets waged a propaganda struggle for the hearts and minds of people around the world, they consistently pounded away at the theme of racial segregation in the American South. State Department officials and foreign policy advisers in the Eisenhower White House were reluctant to provide them with yet another equality issue. A National Security Council task force on international communism had concluded that summer that one of the most effective ways to counteract Soviet propaganda was to show the world more than white males. “We should make more extensive use of nonwhite American citizens,” the task force report stated. “Outstanding Negroes in all fields should be appealed to in terms of highest patriotism to act as our representatives.” It was partly with that in mind that the White House financed the trip to Moscow with funds from the President’s Special International Program for Cultural Presentations.
“CLIPPER AAU” was painted on the side of the Pan American Airways DC-7C that rumbled down the runway of New York’s Idlewild Airport on the morning of July 20 and charted a northern arc across the Atlantic. The U.S. team was seventy-three strong counting coaches and officials. Uncertainty about what lay ahead was evident in the cargo hold, which contained four hundred pounds of extra food in case the Russian fare was inedible. It was the largest delegation of American track-and-field stars ever assembled outside the Olympics. Six previous Olympic gold medal winners were aboard, including shot-putter Parry O’Brien, who captained the squad, and hurdler Glenn Davis, who had been chosen to carry the American flag. But the best among them, still looking for his first gold medal, fit whatever notion the government might have had of an “outstanding Negro.”
This was Rafer Lewis Johnson, who had won the U.S. decathlon championship in Palmyra, New Jersey, on the same day the Tigerbelles swept the sprints up in Morristown. Rafer Johnson was considered an exemplar of sound mind and sound body—a student body president at UCLA, intelligent, movie-star handsome, classically sculpted at six-three and two hundred pounds, with long legs and a muscular frame. There was an aura about Johnson that lifted him above the crowd. He was ferociously competitive yet not as self-centered as most athletes, with a universal perspective that came from growing up black, the son of a factory worker at an animal food processing plant, in a historically Swedish town in central California. Johnson boarded the plane with an unopened letter from his college coach, Ducky Drake, in his pocket, and failure etched in his mind.
It was at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne that Johnson had suffered the most painful loss of his young career. He had gone down to Australia as a gold medal favorite, so talented that he qualified for the team not only in the ten-event decathlon but also separately in the long jump, then called the broad jump. While warming up, he pulled a muscle in his right leg, an injury that forced him out of the broad-jump competition but did not sideline him completely. He battled on in the punishing two-day decathlon, but was slowed just enough that he finished second behind teammate Milt Campbell, an oft-overlooked champion who had been the first black to win the decathlon. From his earliest days in Kingsburg, out in the flats of California’s San Joaquin Valley, Rafer had always been the golden boy, superior in anything he tried, from football to basketball to the broad jump. His showing in Melbourne shattered him. Normally stoic, a model of athletic poise, the twenty-one-year-old broke down in the arms of Coach Drake at the end, crying inconsolably.
Drake talked to his star
long into the night, and from the depths of that discussion Johnson emerged with a deeper understanding of what it took. “When you finish second, you have to take a real close look at how you performed, how you thought, and how these thoughts caused you to feel, and how you reacted to that,” Johnson said later. “We broke those things down. So often with a victory and another victory and another, you are just kind of doing the same thing.” He had heard the words before, but now he absorbed them: “You have to do it on that day. You have to do it at the time when they fire the gun. You have to do it on the hour when play is to start. You have to be fully aware and prepared for anything that might happen.”
Johnson sensed a transformation. He became a different athlete, mentally stronger, his foundation totally rebuilt. He would not boast, but his confidence transcended words; he felt an indomitable will to win. He waited a year and a half after Melbourne to compete again in a decathlon. Still favoring his right leg, and taking only one try in the broad jump, high jump, and pole vault, he nonetheless easily won the Kingsburg Invitational in his hometown in June 1958, then defeated his UCLA teammate C. K. Yang and Oregon’s Edstrom in the nationals a month later in Palmyra. Since Yang, who finished second, was a citizen of Taiwan, Edstrom qualified as the other decathlete on the squad heading for Moscow. Edstrom’s assignment was to fight for third-place points against the second-best Russian, Yuri Kutenko. Johnson would face a more formidable challenge in a battle with Vasily Kuznetsov, who had finished third in Melbourne but now held the pending world decathlon record of 8013 points, the first ever to exceed the 8000 mark. The Johnson versus Kuznetsov decathlon battle was the most anticipated event in what the Soviet press was already calling the Match of the Giants.
Pan Am took Johnson and his teammates as far as Oslo, Norway, overnight, where they stopped for fuel and picked up a handful of U.S. athletes already touring Europe. The transatlantic flight had been a fifteen-hour party back in the coach section, with the Tigerbelles and shot-putter Earlene Brown of Los Angeles singing, clapping, and whooping it up with the boys. Someone hauled out a guitar; they danced in the aisles. Then on to Helsinki, where they lingered at the airport all day, bored and weary in Finland. When someone asked why they had to wait around so long, the answer came back that the Soviets wanted them to arrive after dark. “They sat us on the tarmac for hours, just wouldn’t let us in,” remembered Rink Babka, a University of Southern California athlete who made the team as a discus thrower. Finally they boarded three smaller planes, one Finnish and two Russian Aeroflots, for the final leg to Moscow. The strangeness of the scene stuck in the memory of David Edstrom: “It was a two-engine plane, and the seats were like what you would find in a Blue Bird bus for schoolkids. Rigid. And they served us vodka and caviar.”
When the Americans landed in Moscow, there was another hour on the runway, far from any gate, before they could get out. Little Eddie Rosenblum, a Washington lawyer who ran the AAU’s foreign relations committee as a combination cheerleader and promoter, stood at the plane’s exit door, his bald head topped by a fedora, and proclaimed that he was going to march down the stairs carrying an American flag. As Ed Temple recalled the moment: “Eddie was a dyed-in-the-wool USA person. ‘Give me the flag,’ he says. Sounds good to us. I was third or fourth in line behind him. Then the door opened, and there were these two Russians standing out there with tommy guns on their shoulders, and Ed Rosenblum passed that flag back so fast…the flag went along past me; move that flag right on! I was scared. These people mean business over here.”
In the official delegation waiting on the tarmac stood Gavriel Korobkov, coach of the Soviet team. With his heavy-framed glasses and slouched posture, Korobkov looked more like an intellectual than a jock, and in fact he was both. Track and field was his passion, but he spent much of his spare time at the apartment he shared with his mother in suburban Moscow, listening to the BBC on the radio and poring over English language magazines. As he watched the Americans descend, Korobkov searched with keen interest for Payton Jordan, head track coach at Stanford University. He introduced himself and then asked, “Do you remember receiving a letter from a Russian many years ago? That was me!” More than a decade earlier, when Jordan himself was a top sprinter at Southern Cal, Korobkov had written him saying that he too was a sprinter, but with a lot to learn. “I would like to know very much everything you do,” Korobkov wrote. “I beg of you, please, tell me of your training program. I’d be gracious to you forever if you help me.”
Jordan, later described by one of his runners as a “Paleolithic conservative with…ultra-right-wing views,” did indeed remember, for he had responded to the unusual request by outlining his track regimen in detail to the young Russian. At the time, back in the late 1940s, the Soviets were an unknown quantity in track and field. They had dropped out of the Olympic Games in the 1920s, deriding them as a capitalist enterprise, and only gradually reentered international competition after World War II, appearing in various European track-and-field meets. But they did not return to the Olympics until 1952 in Helsinki. By then the Soviets had decided that they could use sports as propaganda to prove the superiority of the socialist system, and track and field, with its objective and irrefutable times and distances, became an essential part of that effort.
After the eerie bus ride into central Moscow, the Americans had five full days in the city before the dual meet. Much of that time was spent dozing at the hotel or training at the stadium track, where their practice routines were filmed by Russian observers. One night the athletes were invited to the American embassy, which was monitoring the visit, sending regular dispatches to Washington on whether the tour was serving its intended purpose of counteracting Soviet propaganda. (“Team members were consistently well dressed, breezy, and friendly,” one diplomatic file to the State Department noted. “But what very evidently made the greatest impression was the indiscriminate comradeship between Negro and white team members, which gave lie in dramatic fashion to the regime’s propaganda about segregation in U.S. life.”) Another night bulky Rink Babka, all 270 pounds of him, attended his first ballet, the Bolshoi, the only male in a small group of Americans who took up an offer for free tickets. Babka, Parry O’Brien, Glenn Davis, and Rafer Johnson visited Red Square one afternoon, hiding their cameras under their sport coats, thinking they could take pictures of Lenin’s Tomb. “We got in line and finally got up to the tomb and started taking pictures, acting like no one could see us,” Babka recalled. “They grabbed us and took our cameras away and scared the heck out of us.”
Dallas Long, a shot-putter who had just finished high school in Phoenix and was the baby of the team, rarely strayed from the hotel lobby and never spent a ruble of the expense money the athletes were given. He did notice that the well-dressed Russian men hanging around the lobby seemed to speak English fluently. Must be spies, he thought. Gordon McKenzie, a distance runner, enjoyed interacting with the Russian bus drivers, and often played or kibitzed when they staged impromptu chess matches on the sidewalk outside the coach. Edstrom, thrilled just to share a room with Rafer Johnson, who had been his athletic hero for years, parked himself at Red Square for hours and took notes on the unfamiliar sights.
The Tigerbelles came down to the lobby one day and encountered a black American expatriate from New York with his Russian wife and their two little girls. He wanted his children to meet some Americans with the same skin color and hair texture. Not only did the Tigerbelles talk to the girls, they invited them up to one of their rooms and fixed their hair in a curl and twist that no one in white Moscow knew how to do. The women runners brought their own curling irons, along with compact sterno cans to heat them. “We ran out of sterno one day,” recalled Lucinda Williams, “so I asked one of the Russian maids, ‘Can you get me a hot plate?’ We thought we could plug in the hot plate and heat up the curling iron with that. Well, the maid understood but she didn’t understand. She comes back with this bath towel and unwraps it to show us a dinner plate that they had heated up i
n the oven! That was the hot plate.”
The extra food U.S. officials brought along never materialized. Perhaps the solicitousness of the hotel’s kitchen staff made the Americans realize that hauling out their own care packages would create an untoward international incident. The Russian food in any case was a constant source of conversation. On the flight over, the Tigerbelles debated whether it was true that Russians ate horsemeat, the thought of which gave them the creeps. Lucinda Williams was relieved to eat borscht for a week, as long as it came with “a lot of that good Russian bread.” At breakfast, the athletes were told that the hotel cooks had been trained to prepare dishes American style, so they could order any kind of eggs they wanted for breakfast. They placed their orders through an interpreter—sunny-side up, over easy, scrambled—but it seemed that no matter what they ordered, the results came out the same. Babka grew sick of the chicken: “boiled chicken, broiled chicken, chicken broth soup…” His parents were both immigrants from Czechoslovakia who loved the new world out on the plains of Nebraska, but it was not until Rink reached Moscow, he said, that he started to appreciate their lectures about how lucky he was to be American.
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