Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  AS GERMAN tourists streamed south through the Alps, the last of the American athletes to leave New York—the men’s track-and-field squad and the basketball team—were just arriving in Switzerland, drained and leg weary, after their own fourteen-hour flight. U.S. Olympic officials had arranged for a track meet in Bern and basketball exhibition games in Geneva and Lugano as warm-ups for Rome in the week before the Opening Ceremony. Harold Connolly, the veteran hammer thrower, spoke aloud for many of his teammates when he groused about this side trip. It would interfere with serious training, he said, and was “simply a sightseeing trip for officials who want to see the Alps.” Here again, there was little sympathy from the athletes for their overseers; word spread among them that the real reason the Swiss trip was booked was because the foreign hosts had agreed to pay the charter travel costs.

  Pete Newell, the U.S. Olympic basketball coach, nevertheless welcomed the games in Switzerland, which he hoped would prepare his young team for the vagaries of international officiating. Newell, who had just retired as head coach at the University of California, Berkeley, after leading the Bears to an NCAA championship in 1959 and a loss to Ohio State in the finals that spring, had the luxury of working with his Olympic squad since early April, when selections were made after Trials in Denver. The team was busting with talented college players unfamiliar with the international style, starting with the stellar trio of Oscar Robertson from the University of Cincinnati, Jerry West from West Virginia University, and Jerry Lucas from Ohio State, along with Walt Bellamy of Indiana University, Terry Dischinger of Purdue University, Jay Arnette of the University of Texas, and Darrall Imhoff of UC Berkeley. But the other players were chosen by an AAU-dominated Olympic selection committee influenced by corporations like Phillips Petroleum in Tulsa and Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, which sponsored ostensibly amateur teams and enjoyed the publicity that came with helping finance the Olympic effort. A few of their players were both experienced in international play and good enough to demand playing time, but others took roster spots that might have gone to more talented collegians, including two future Hall of Famers unable to make the team, John Havlicek of Ohio State and Lenny Wilkins of Providence College.

  The first exhibition game, played in Geneva on Saturday, August 20, taught Newell little about his team. Not much to learn when the score is 122–37, and the Swiss opposition is a makeshift squad of local university students. But the Americans did get some benefit from playing with an official Olympic ball, which was bald and slippery, and made from eighteen pieces of leather, unlike the seamless one-piece American ball, with its sticky little pebble grains. The one-sided match served one other purpose: it sent a message to officials of Soviet basketball, who until then knew nothing about Robertson and West and Lucas, and so had been talking confidently about taking on the American neophytes. A face in the crowd was Semyon K. Tsarapkin, chief Soviet delegate to the three-power U.S.-British-Soviet A-bomb test ban talks in Geneva, which the next day would adjourn for two months. Reports from courtside portrayed Tsarapkin, a veteran diplomat who later would negotiate the nuclear hotline with the U.S., sitting in the front row “looking glumly at the exhibition of American superiority.”

  The track-and-field team faced equally unimposing competition at its weekend meet in Bern against second-tier athletes from England, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Austria. There was no decathlon, so Rafer Johnson competed instead in a few individual events, refining his technique in the javelin and long jump. Don Bragg, favoring a sore leg, took it easy in the pole vault, as did John Thomas, the heralded young high jumper. The talk of the meet was Lee Calhoun, who ran the 110-meter high hurdles in 13.2 seconds, tying the world record set by Germany’s Martin Lauer. Calhoun seemed to be rounding into form nicely after his year-long suspension in 1958, punishment for breaking amateur rules by marrying his wife on national television and accepting the show’s wedding gifts. Glenn Davis, the multitalented low hurdler, ran free and easy in the 200-meter hurdles, an event that was not in the Olympics, and established another record at that rarely run distance. And Ralph Boston, a long jumper from Tennessee State, the adopted big brother of the Tigerbelles, also broke a world record, flying twenty-six feet, eight and seven-eighths inches. The 100-meter dash followed what had become a familiar recent pattern. Ray Norton, from the track club at San Jose State College, had won the Olympic Trials at Stanford in July and was the heavy favorite in Rome. In most pre-Olympic write-ups, in fact, Norton was labeled a likely triple gold medal winner—for 100, 200, and relay. But shortly after the trials, Dave Sime had started beating him in practice meets, and Sime outran him again in Bern. The coaches seemed unconcerned about Norton. He would come around for Rome, they said.

  No one seemed worried about Jim Beatty, either, especially since he won his event in Bern. Beatty had made the Olympic team in the 5000-meter run with the same deep motivation that drove Dave Sime, his friend and roommate. He had been at his prime as a college runner at the University of North Carolina in 1956 but failed to make it to Melbourne that year, and essentially quit running until the lure of Rome drew him back. In October 1959 he drove across the country to California to train with the renowned distance coach Mihaly Igloi, a Hungarian exile. The journey itself would remain burnished in his mind: turning twenty-five on the road, stopping in Reno, Nevada, to hear the Four Aces sing “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” heading down the highway to San Jose. Overweight, out of running shape, but with a bundle of heart, Beatty trained to Olympic standards, running all the distance races, from the metric mile to the 5000. By May 1960 he had clocked a sub–four-minute mile and a 13:51 in the 5000. He could have run either, but chose the 5000 for the Olympics. Rome was a week away. And now, as he propelled into his kick to victory on the straightaway in Bern, he hit a soft pocket in the cinder track, and a jolt of electricity shot up his leg as he crossed the finish line.

  Everything in Switzerland could be deceiving. All traces of the flu that had leveled Dave Sime in New York seemed gone now. Saturday night in Bern had been cold and blustery, but a bright sun burnished a becalmed blue sky as the meet came to an end Sunday afternoon. When the team bus stopped near a glacier-fed river, Al Cantello, the javelin thrower, and Bill Nieder, a shot-putter, led a stampede out the door to dive in. “It wasn’t very deep, but the river was moving,” Rink Babka, the discus thrower, recalled. “If you put your ear in, you could hear the gravel moving.” Babka sensed at one point that Rafer Johnson was having trouble with the current and pulled him off to the side. Sime luxuriated in the bracing water. One of the coaches instructed him to rest that night, but the med student paid no attention. He had brought his wife along, and they stayed out until three in the morning. “That,” he said later, “is when I got the chills.”

  Like many of his colleagues in the sportswriting fraternity, Fred Russell, veteran columnist at the Nashville Banner, had spent the summer touring the continent. In Spain he wrote about Picasso. In Germany he posed in a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet. In Paris he wore a beret. Russell was a prankster with a light touch, but when he reached Switzerland he wrote in awe of the juggernaut he was joining. “In 32 years of sports writing, no experience I’ve had has been more rewarding than the privilege of joining the Olympic squad. [Now] it’s a trip into the Alps, then the train ride to Rome Tuesday.” The train arrived in Rome Tuesday, but the journey began Monday, and quite a ride it turned out to be. The track-and-field athletes boarded first and took up several compartments, settling in for a long overnight trip. No one slept, according to Rafer Johnson, the team captain. “It was all fun, and we laughed and talked the whole time.”

  Laughed and talked and tossed furniture, to be more precise. Hour by hour, piece by piece, chairs and cushions went flying out into the alpine darkness; even fixtures ripped from the wall. One car, by dawn, was stripped bare, with not a single bit of furnishing left.

  The basketball team boarded at six-thirty that morning in Lugano, closer to the Italian border, and t
he chaos continued. Coach Newell and his men had trouble getting aboard because of language problems. “No one could understand when we asked where our compartments were,” Newell said later. “We’d go one way and get a no. We’d start the other way and get another no. Finally we let down a window and piled all our luggage into the first empty compartment, except that it wasn’t empty. There was a guy asleep in one corner. We piled our bags all around him, and it was a wonder he didn’t smother. When we finally discovered where we belonged, it was ten cars away. When we got the last bag out, I was relieved to see the guy in the corner still breathing and still asleep.”

  Some people—like the sleeping stranger and Oscar Robertson—cannot be flustered. The Big O was thrilled by the sights out the window, coming down through Northern Italy’s mountains, hills, and valleys. He also was quietly practicing Italian, all the words and phrases he learned listening to a record every night when the team trained at West Point earlier that month. As a child, Robertson often rode trains between his grandparents’ house near Nashville and his home in Indianapolis, but he had never seen anything like this. “Indianapolis,” he told NBC later, “is very flat.”

  It was afternoon by the time the last Americans reached the Olympic Village. They checked into Buildings 7 and 8, not far from the Brits. Larry Snyder, the track coach, reported that his team was in excellent shape except for a few minor aches and bruises. That is how coaches talk to the press. Dave Sime recalled it this way: “We get into Rome, and I feel like shit. Sore throat. And it’s one hundred three degrees or something.” Not his body temperature, but the weather. “I go see Doc Hanley.” Daniel F. Hanley, from Bowdoin College, was one of the team physicians. “He says strep throat. So I get a shot in the ass. Both cheeks.”

  3

  NO MONARCH EVER HELD SWAY

  WHEN Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, arrived in Rome a week before the Opening Ceremony, he was met at the airport by his guide and chauffeur, Edward Cernaez, who was fluent in French, English, and Italian, and available for assistance around-the-clock. Also there, hovering to the side, was Ambassador Yu Tsun-chi from the Republic of China, who had come unannounced with the hopes of grabbing a few minutes of Brundage’s time. Soon enough Brundage was surrounded by a scrum of reporters armed with questions—first and foremost whether he intended to step down as president, as he had been hinting at for months. “I merely said I was ready for some peace and quiet, nothing more,” Brundage responded. His interrogators persisted: what did that mean? “I don’t want to enlarge upon my previous remarks,” he said. They took that as a no, he did not intend to resign after all. Where he would find peace and quiet was another matter entirely.

  Brundage was seventy-two now, blocky, balding, and bespectacled, with crumpled dark gray suits, the very model of an old-fashioned Midwestern Republican millionaire businessman, which is what he was, yet so much more. From his roots in American athletics—as a trackman at the University of Illinois, U.S. decathlete at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm (where he dropped out after eight events, finishing in sixteenth place, far behind winner Jim Thorpe), and president of the AAU and the American Olympic Committee in the late 1920s and 1930s—Brundage had evolved by 1960 into the personification of the Olympic Movement. His insistence on capitalizing those two words hinted at the grandiosity of his design. He believed that the Olympic Movement, in its reach and meaning, far surpassed any government, religion, or philosophy. The briefcase he carried when he reached Rome held the text of a speech he was to deliver at the solemn opening of the 57th Session of the IOC. In it he asserted that while the greatest political empires all crumbled, his world of sport only grew stronger year by year, expanding to scores of countries on all six continents, even without wealth or armies. “No monarch,” he wrote, “ever held sway over such a vast expanse of territory.”

  Yet as Brundage finished his eighth year as high priest of this secular empire of sweat, the modern world was closing in on him from all sides. His rigid rules on amateurism were being ridiculed by journalists and tested by an increasing number of athletes, who saw everyone making money from their efforts but themselves. New nations were lobbying for more participants and a wider variety of events, while Brundage and his old guard wanted fewer of both. Women wanted to run longer distances, while Brundage and some other traditionalists thought that anything beyond once around the oval track was unladylike. Civil rights activists in South Africa and Great Britain were urging the IOC to live up to its Olympic Creed and expel the apartheid delegation from South Africa, while Brundage took South African leaders at their word that they were letting all citizens compete for roster spots, but colored natives simply were not talented enough.

  And more: in a bid for power conveniently disguised as a democratic movement, the Soviet Union was mounting a challenge to the very structure of the International Olympic Committee, hoping to take it over by transforming the membership selection process. Brundage believed that members of the committee had to remain autonomous and nonideological, devoted not to their countries but to the Olympic cause—even if that meant running the IOC like a secret society, the selection of members determined by a coterie of upper-class gentlemen and various counts, princes, and marquesses, the last dying vestiges of European royalty. From the other side of the cold war came attacks from within his own home country, with the Eisenhower administration and conservative factions in the U.S. accusing Brundage of being wrong, if not traitorous, on the central political issue of the Olympics: whether a delegation should be called the Republic of China or Taiwan.

  All of these matters were so pressing that Brundage could not avoid them, even at meetings where he controlled the agenda. The first forum was a meeting of the IOC executive board held on Friday, August 19, at the Hotel Excelsior, where Brundage and other Olympic leaders were staying, up the street from the American embassy on the pulsating Via Veneto. With its Belle Epoque decor of gilded chairs, pink marble, and high ceilings, the Excelsior was the grande dame of Rome hotels, befitting the elite nature of the IOC’s inner circle. Here sat Dr. Armand Massard of France and the Marquess of Exeter, also known as Lord David Burghley, of England, a former Olympic hurdler who had coveted the presidency since 1952, when Brundage beat him out. Massard and Burghley were the two vice presidents. Also on hand were Count Paolo Thaon di Revel of Italy; Sir Arthur Porritt of New Zealand; Dr. Karl Ritter von Halt of Germany; Bo Ekelund of Sweden, a former high jumper; and General Vladimir Stoichev of Bulgaria, the lone Eastern bloc member. Helping Brundage run the meeting was Otto Mayer, chancellor of the IOC, who oversaw its daily affairs from the Mon Repos headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, with the mannerisms of a snobbish tennis and riding club director. This was the crowd that once got into a harrumphing snit at the outlandish suggestion to forgo the wearing of formal top hats at an outdoor function. Brundage himself was not from the upper class, having made his money in Chicago hotels and office buildings, but he felt at home in the high society world and acted more baronly than any of them.

  The first order of business was consideration of new members of the committee, among them Reginald Stanley Alexander of Kenya, who was in Rome as head of the Kenya Olympic Association. Alexander was a former colonial mayor of Nairobi and had played field hockey for Kenya during his younger days. Most important, he had the blessing of Otto Mayer, who had once dined with him in Lausanne. His stamp of approval came in a 1959 note Mayer sent the Marquess of Exeter. “My idea is he would be a very good member for us,” Mayer wrote then. “He is young, very Olympic minded; he is British (not a coloured man!), and I wonder if it would not be a good idea to have once a member in that section of the world, that means Africa? What do you think?” Good enough for the marquess, and Brundage as well, and Alexander was in. The last thing the inner circle wanted was someone who might be different or take up a cause beyond the Olympic Movement itself. Nearly a decade earlier, when Lord Burghley (he was not yet elevated to marquess by his father’s death) sent al
ong the name of Lord Killanin of Ireland for committee membership, it was with this testimonial: “His history is that, although an active Irishman, he went to Cambridge…I feel that his views on the Irish questions would not be to stir up continual trouble, but rather as far as possible to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’”

  THE MAIN agenda item for the executive board involved China, a big dog that would not stop barking. No issue proved more difficult for Brundage than China—or the two Chinas. There was Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China, or Red China, Communist and controlling the mainland; and the Republic of China, or Nationalist China, based on the island of Taiwan and run by the authoritarian anticommunist Chiang Kaishek. In 1956 both sent delegates to Melbourne, but Mao’s China, which had participated in the 1952 Helsinki Games, refused to compete unless the team from Chiang’s China, which it considered illegitimate, was banned. Two years later, in 1958, when the IOC still would not accede to that demand, the Communist Chinese summarily withdrew from the Olympics and all other international athletic federations. They denounced Brundage as “a tool of the Imperialistic State Department of the United States.”