Ed Temple experienced a starkly different variation on that theme. Two days before the meet, a press conference was arranged for the coaches. The Americans were represented by George Eastment of Manhattan College, Larry Snyder of Ohio State University, and Payton Jordan of Stanford for the men, Temple for the women. The room buzzed with foreign correspondents, photographers, interpreters. Everyone there was white, except the coach from Tennessee State. All the questions were about the men. Manipulating the expectations game, as coaches naturally do, the Russians said they expected the Americans to win. Eastment said that six of his athletes were recovering from sore throats. There was much talk about the Johnson versus Kuznetsov match. Temple sat there, feeling ignored, for nearly a half hour until finally a reporter turned to him and asked, “Coach Temple, on your United States team, how many Negro athletes do you have as compared to white athletes?”
Temple paused; he had never counted them before. He was running through the roster in his mind when George Eastment jumped in. “I’ll take that,” Eastment said. “We don’t consider them Negro or white on this team. We’re all Americans.”
The interruption was well-intentioned, but surprised Temple nonetheless. He could remember back to his first trip south from Pennsylvania down to school at Tennessee State, and how when the train passed Cincinnati and neared Louisville he was moved to the colored car; and how on the trolleys in Nashville he had to ride in the back; and how at the two downtown theaters in Nashville, Loew’s and the Paramount, the “colored” had to walk up three flights of stairs to the top balcony after entering from a back alley. On the very day of this press conference in the capital of the Soviet Union, the next governor of Tennessee was campaigning back in the United States, in the city of Franklin, and a reporter for the Nashville Banner was typing out the lead: “Buford Ellington said here today that it is in the best interests of all Tennesseans to prevent the mixing of the races…”
“I’ll be damned,” Temple said to himself after being spoken for at the press conference. “We have to come all the way to Moscow for me to hear ‘We’re all Americans.’”
ON THE EVE of the track meet, Rafer Johnson opened the letter from Ducky Drake, his coach. Drake, who also served as the football trainer at UCLA, had not been selected for the U.S. coaching staff, but he knew how important his presence had been in Melbourne, and he wanted to remind Johnson that he was there with him in Moscow, in spirit at least.
“You thought 7,000 miles or so could separate us, but they can’t,” Drake wrote. “These next couple of days I’ll be just as much with you as at Palmyra…Remember you’re the champion. You’re the one they have to beat, so let them worry. Go about your work with a quiet confidence that cannot be shaken…No matter what happens, remember if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you can move mountains. Remember, victory is sweet. World records come when least expected. Work and think on each event as it comes up. Do your best. No one can ask or expect more.”
Soccer usually captivated sports fans in Moscow during the heat of summer, but the athletic singularity and political symbolism of the historic confrontation created a feverish interest in the track meet against the United States. A huge, clamorous crowd filled the vastness of Lenin Stadium on the gray, humid Sunday afternoon of July 27 for the first day of competition. There was no official ticket count, but estimates ranged from seventy-five thousand to a hundred thousand people.
For the athletes, this was more than an exhibition, and the tension was comparable to the Olympics. “We felt a lot of pressure to beat the Russians,” David Edstrom recalled. Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, a twenty-year-old broad jumper from Kiev, who had been the youngest member of the Soviet team in Melbourne, said the pressure on his side was even more stressful than the Olympics. “There was definitely pressure on the Soviet team to beat the Americans. It extended beyond sports into politics. So there was some brainwashing going on, as usual, of the athletes, and we on the Soviet team realized the responsibility we had. It was like we were coming out of the trenches and fighting fist to fist, face to face.” The Soviet motto, in fact, was: “Fight every point. Fight from the start right up to the last moment of competition.”
After reading day after day how lightly regarded his American women were, Ed Temple arrived at the stadium with a positive feeling, anticipating that his Tigerbelles-led team had been underestimated. Rather than tightening up, his charges had appeared lighthearted on the bus ride over from the hotel. Big Momma Brown, as the foreign press called Earlene Brown, the shot-putter, was so loose that she marched onto the field wearing an oversized Uzbek hat, a gesture that immediately won over the Russian audience. The warmth they showed Brown was not felt by Rink Babka, who marched in with his discus teammate, Al Oerter, and their two Russian counterparts. It seemed that whenever he walked close enough to the stands for fans to see his name on a placard, he would hear disapproving whistles. “Guess they’re just booing us,” Babka said to Oerter. Tamara Press, the big, friendly discus thrower and shot-putter on the Russian women’s team, finally came over to Babka, put her arm around him, and said, “Rink, don’t feel bad. They’re just kidding you.” The word Babka, she explained, sounded like a kind of Russian slang for a good-looking chick.
The athletes exchanged miniature stars-and-stripes and hammer-and-sickle flags and tolerated the protocol of perfunctory official speeches, and then the background buzz and bustle suddenly dissolved into silence for the playing of the U.S. national anthem. “That never left my mind,” Ed Temple said later. “A hundred thousand people stood up, and you didn’t hear a pin drop.”
As the afternoon wore on, it became clear that Temple was astute about his team. Of all the matches that first day, the most electric was the women’s 100-meter dash. The winner in a blur was Barbara Jones, who barely nosed out Russian Vera Krepkina, with Jones’s teammate Isabelle Daniels finishing a close third. A Chicago native who had transferred to Tennessee State after losing her scholarship at Marquette University, Jones was the most headstrong of the Tigerbelles, often complaining about the rigorous training regimen Temple imposed. “I felt the work was too strenuous and the rules were ridiculous,” she once said. But she stuck with the program and eventually came to believe that Temple helped her evolve “from a child to a woman.” Later that first day, she and Daniels teamed with Lucinda Williams and Margaret Matthews to win the 4 x 100 meter relay. In perhaps an even bigger upset, Earlene Brown, who had gained strength and lost 15 pounds (from 235 down to 220) after three weeks of training under Temple, won the shot-put competition, outdistancing the favored Tamara Press.
The most disconcerting event of the day was the men’s 10,000-meter run. Both American entrants, Jerry Smartt and Gordon McKenzie, struggled with cramps halfway through the race. Smartt slackened to a feeble trot but kept moving forward and eventually finished the race. McKenzie hurt so much that he slowed to a walk and at one point apparently stepped off the track. He was sick and sore (the worst of the sore throats) and didn’t want to finish, but his coaches were adamant. Even if he came in last, the Americans would get one point; only by dropping out would they get zero. Every point counted in the match of the giants. Keep going, the coaches shouted, and McKenzie tried to resume, but a Soviet official intervened and said that he had been disqualified. The only dispute of the games ensued, a minor one at that, and the disqualification was upheld.
The Russians cheered wildly for their victories in the distance race and 20-kilometer walk, but by the end of the day the Americans held a slim lead in total points, 83–75. And midway through the decathlon, Rafer Johnson had soared ahead of his rival Kuznetsov, winning the 100, the 400, and the shot put, and scoring decently in the broad jump and high jump. He had followed the instructions in Ducky Drake’s letter event by event, and expressed confidence about what was to follow. “I’m going to win,” he said. “I have to.”
The crowd the next afternoon, a drizzly Monday, was less than half of Sunday’s turnout, down to thirty thousand or so, le
aving large swaths of empty seats in the cavernous stadium. The rain transformed the discus circle, dirt rather than cement, into a muddy pit. Though the Russian women pulled into a larger lead, the Tigerbelles and Earlene Brown continued to excel. Brown came in a close second to Tamara Press in the discus, and Lucinda Williams, entering her senior year at Tennessee State and captain of the U.S. women’s team, streaked to the tape in the 200-meter dash in a photo finish with Maria Itkina. “It was my first experience with a real photo finish,” Williams said later. “We had to wait around for the photo because we didn’t know who had won. I knew I had done the lean, the Tennessee State lean that Coach Temple always taught us; keep running through the tape and lean. I knew I had done that. But I said to myself, ‘I know they are not going to give it to me. Here in Moscow.’ And all of a sudden they flash something on the scoreboard marquee. I couldn’t understand most of it, but I knew it said 1—USA!” Williams and Itkina hugged each other at the news. They had bonded by then, and Williams said to herself that someday she would name a daughter after her Russian friend. (Years later, she took pleasure in explaining to Kimberly Maria Adams the derivation of her middle name.)
For the men, Babka won the discus, Glenn Davis the hurdles, and O’Brien and Long swept the shot put, but the Russians surprised in the high jump and gained points in the javelin and 5000-meter run. Now all attention was focused on the decathlon. Kuznetsov began the day favored in three of the final five events: the 110-meter hurdles, pole vault, and 1500 meters. If he could get to that final race, the metric mile, within range, the Soviet press thought, he might win the match. Correspondent Max Frankel, covering the event for the New York Times, noted that the Russians had “made something of a cult of personality in their cheering for Vasily Kuznetsov.” But nothing could disrupt Rafer Johnson, mind alert, body relaxed, deep in an athletic trance. He carried with him the lessons of Melbourne. Whatever happened, he was mentally ready. Rather than being exhausted and out of breath, he seemed to gain momentum from the fact that the Russians shortened the intervals between events from a half hour down to twenty minutes. In the second-to-last event, the javelin, Drake’s message stuck in his mind: “Check the wind. Get a good angle of flight.” On his third and final throw, despite the sloppy conditions, he heaved the javelin 238 feet 17/8 inches. With that single extraordinary effort, more than 20 feet farther than his opponent and worth nearly 300 points, Johnson clinched victory and at the same time overtook Kuznetsov’s brief world record—and he had another event still to go.
The metric mile, run in the darkness late that night, was neither tense nor anticlimactic, but rather a long, steady victory lap for the world champion, who stayed at Kuznetsov’s heels the entire way—and the Russian fans rose as one to cheer him on to the then-stunning total of 8302 points.
David Edstrom did his job too, edging out Kutenko for third place. But it was not quite enough. Soviet sportswriters took note of the electronic stadium scoreboard that glowed with the final team scores. USSR 172, US 170. In a contest that could not have been closer, the scoreboard indicated that the Russians had won. Like all disputes between the superpowers, victory was subject to interpretation. The U.S. men won their half 126–109, but the women, despite the brilliance of the Tigerbelles, lost 63–44. Even then, as R. L. Quercetani argued in Track & Field News, only an anomaly in the scoring system allowed the Soviets to claim a win. At most European meets, the losing relay team in a dual meet received two points, but here it was three. “The results of the ‘combined match’—what a ridiculous thing!—would have been 170 to 169 USA instead of 172 to 170 if the scoring had been different,” Quercetani wrote. That exclamation-pointed desultory aside was his only acknowledgment that women participated in the meet.
An honored truism in sports holds that teams come before individuals, and that what matters, what is remembered in history, is the final score, not how a single athlete performs. This truism often proves false, as it did in Moscow on that summer night in 1958. Not the Soviet point total but the memory of Rafer Johnson is what endures. “One can never forget the brilliant performance of Rafer Johnson,” declared Pravda sports commentator Lev Lebedev. “It will dignify the history of world athletic records for a long time to come.” Quercetani called Johnson’s performance “no doubt the most spectacular feat in the history of the decathlon since the days of Jim Thorpe.”
The atmosphere at the end was established by Kuznetsov himself, who admired Johnson and had written him several friendly notes since they had first met at Melbourne two years earlier. Now, the match of the giants done, the remaining fans standing and roaring their approval, he walked over to Johnson, squeezed his hand, kissed him on the cheek, and embraced him. Another roar burst out when Johnson ascended the victory platform and waved a bouquet of flowers. “Spasibo,” Johnson said, thanking his hosts in Russian. A short time later, after the American had gathered his gear and was on his way to the idling bus, a throng of a few hundred Russian fans swarmed around him. He was frightened at first. Could this be like the angry mob that had thrown purple ink at the American embassy in Moscow less than a month earlier? “I didn’t really know what was happening,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what they were going to do with me.”
Outside Lenin Stadium, in the darkness of that late July night in Moscow, amid all the tension of the cold war, the Russian people hoisted Rafer Johnson onto their shoulders and paraded him around, chanting boisterously for the greatest athlete in the world.
2
ALL ROADS TO ROME
TWO weeks before the opening of the 1960 Rome Olympics, in the midst of one of the hottest summers of the cold war, a press counselor for the Italian embassy in Washington paid a courtesy call on his counterpart at the U.S. Department of State. With diplomatic politesse, Gabriele Paresce said that he was there to remind American officials that Italy, as the host country, hoped to keep the Rome Olympics “free from activity of a political or propaganda nature.”
After reaching into his briefcase, Paresce handed John G. Kormann a document known as an aide-memoire. It included part of a speech on the Olympic spirit delivered by Italian defense minister Giulio Andreotti, president of the Organizing Committee for the Games of the XVII Olympiad. Other Italian press attachés were undertaking similar missions at capitals around the world, Paresce said. He wanted to assure the Americans that in their case the visit was a mere formality. The Italians expected no problems from them. On the other hand, they were “seriously concerned that the Iron Curtain countries should be admonished not to exploit contacts at the Games for propaganda purposes.” When it came to the communists, according to Paresce, it would be a case of “No propaganda, or we throw you out!” Before leaving, he asked Kormann to relay his message to the United States Olympic Committee. Kormann explained that American Olympic officials were not controlled by the government and could not be told what to do, but he happened to be on friendly terms with the press director, Arthur Lentz, and would be happy to pass along the word. He said he was certain that both the State Department and the USOC “wanted to maintain the true spirit of the Games.” After Paresce left, Kormann called Lentz in New York, where the U.S. team was assembling in preparation for Rome. Lentz promised him that the Americans would do all they could to respect the Italian request.
The next morning, Saturday, August 13, David Sime, a sprinter on the U.S. team, was alone in his room at the Vanderbilt Hotel in Manhattan, weakened by the flu, when the telephone rang. “Is this David Sime?” a man asked. He said he was from the government and wanted to talk.
“About what?” Sime wondered. He was not in a sociable mood. If he had felt better, he would have been at Van Cortlandt Stadium, in the Bronx, going through the training regimen with the rest of the track-and-field team. Instead, he remained at the delegation’s hotel at Park Avenue and 34th Street, preserving his strength for his moment of truth. That would come eighteen days later inside Stadio Olimpico in Rome, when the red-haired Duke University medical student was sch
eduled to race in the 100-meter dash, one of the premier events of the Olympics.
But this caller was insistent, and already knew enough to pronounce his name so that it rhymed with rim. Scottish. Forget the e on the end.
Come on up, Sime said.
Once inside the room, the federal agent told Sime that the United States of America could use his help. After analyzing intelligence from European contacts and carefully observing Soviet stars who had been in Philadelphia for the second US-USSR dual track meet in 1959, they had targeted an athlete who might be approachable in Rome, an interesting prospect for defection.
Is this a hoax? Sime asked. As an amateur athlete, one could never tell what was real and what was a joke. Almost every week, some decision made by the brass at the Amateur Athletic Union seemed unreal. Who could believe it when they suspended the eligibility of his friend Lee Calhoun, the champion high hurdler from North Carolina College at Durham, for a year because Calhoun and his wife, Gwen, got married on the Bride and Groom television game show? That was a joke, or should have been, but it was not. Then there were the athletes themselves. Sime knew enough prankster teammates, especially his pals from that summer’s Olympic Trials and practice meets, pole-vaulter Don Bragg and javelin thrower Al Cantello, to suspect that they might be setting him up.
Deadly serious, the visitor flashed a government ID. “We’d like you to come to Washington,” he said. “We’ll have you back tonight.”
There was a flight to Washington, a black car waiting, a ride to a nondescript building, a brisk walk to a secured room—it was all a strange blur. “I had no idea where I was. There were three of us in the room. ‘Here’s the guy’s name,’ they said.” It was Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. “‘Here’s what he looks like. We will contact you in Rome and go from there if you do it.’ They wanted me to meet with him because they figured I was a medical student, and it would have more merit to it.”
Rome 1960 Page 3