Much to worry about, but that was not her inclination. Wilma Rudolph was thriving in Rome. With her endearing smile, playful manner, and the entrancing eyes of a forest fawn, she drew men and women to her side with unadorned charm, a demeanor that an observer once called “of a natural delicacy and sweetness as true as good weather.” If all the guys in the village were crazy about her, she managed to handle it without making other women jealous. It was said that if you told Wilma you liked her dress, she would give it to you then and there, even though she only had two dresses in college; the one she was wearing and the other one at the cleaners. Worldly things meant little to her, nor did prizes and fame. Her will to win came from another impulse, to prove herself worthy. Her carefree disposition made it difficult to imagine the trauma she had endured in the first twenty years of her life.
As a child, Wilma was underweight and sickly, and also special and spoiled—not an easy circumstance in the boisterous family of railroad man Ed Rudolph and his wife, Blanche, who together brought home less than $2,500 year and lived without indoor plumbing in a dusty red-frame house at 644 Kellogg Street in Clarksville. The neighborhood was poor and black, tucked into the undulating hills up Kraft Street from the Red River on the back edge of then all-white Austin Peay State University. The Rudolphs had twenty-two children between them, although only eight together and rarely more than that number living with them at one time. Wilma was the fifth of the final group of eight. Her siblings, competing for attention in the cacophony of the overstretched household, did not begrudge her the time and care she needed, though they groused that she never had to do the dishes and teased her for being a crybaby.
During the worst years of Wilma’s childhood infirmity, they took turns carrying her from room to room. They massaged her polio-crippled left leg four times a day and were part of the troupe accompanying her down to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the nation’s leading training hospital for black physicians, for heat and water therapy on the one day a week that their mother, a maid, did not have to work in the large homes on the white side of town. “The trips to Nashville, we would always go to the Greyhound bus station and get on this huge, big bus, and it seemed like such a long ride to Nashville because of all the stops in between,” recalled Yvonne Rudolph, her older sister. “We would get to the hospital, and it seemed like a huge building, so different from anything in Clarksville. Wilma was shy, and sometimes she would just cry because she didn’t like it at all. But we kept telling her that it would make her better and she would feel better, and she would not always have to wear the brace. I think that’s what really kept her going, because she knew one day she would not have to wear it.”
As Wilma later described her early childhood, she was depressed and lonely at first, especially when she had to watch her brothers and sisters run off to school while she stayed home, burdened with the dead weight of the heavy braces. She felt rejected, she said, and would close her eyes “and just drift off into a sinking feeling, going down, down, down.” Soon her loneliness turned to anger. She hated the fact that her peers always teased her. She didn’t like any of her supposed friends. She wondered whether living just meant being sick all the time, and told herself it had to be more than that, and she started fighting back, determined to beat the illness.
By age eight she would ditch her leg braces when her parents were not looking, but she was still the last kid chosen in outdoor games, which amounted to the Rudolph brood’s version of the Olympics: who could jump the highest, run the fastest, throw the farthest. Then one day her father, who did the shopping in the family, came home with regular shoes for Wilma, marking a dramatic change in her life. As Yvonne remembered the scene: “They were no longer the high-top shoes that she had to have with the braces. And my mother took her into a room all by herself; she didn’t even let us know she had these shoes. And they put them on her, and she came out of the room, and she was beaming all over. It was like she was a whole new little girl. And after that it was like she knew she was no different, and it gave her more confidence at that point.” On special days, the Rudolph girls would be expected to deliver speeches at their church. It was Wilma’s turn soon after she got her new shoes. “And when she got up, you didn’t hear her braces,” Yvonne said. “And she went up on stage, and she said her speech very loud and very proud, and she took a bow. And everybody in the church cheered for her. And she was just very, very happy.”
It was around that time that her brother Westley put up a peach basket in the backyard, and Wilma, without braces and barefoot, began to play ball with him. She seemed obsessed with the sport, her mother thought, as though she were making up for lost time. She would shoot baskets soon after she awoke in the morning and before she was called in for dinner at night. Within a few years she was playing for Coach Clinton C. Gray’s squad at Burt High. That is where Ed Temple, who also moonlighted as a high school basketball referee, first spotted her. He was so struck by the way this freshman phenom, the lanky girl nicknamed Skeeter, breezed down the court on the fast break that he invited her to attend his track camp at Tennessee State in the summer of 1955.
She almost gave up at first. Temple’s boot-camp training regimen, including daily three-mile and one-mile cross-country runs through the potholed and snake-infested pastures next to the college farm, discouraged her, but even more she felt outclassed by the older Tigerbelles, who consistently drubbed her in the sprints. But Temple saw something. Greatness was what he wanted for his girls, but it was the one thing he couldn’t teach. He believed you were born with it. He couldn’t make you run fast. What he could do was help you run faster. “Stretch out!” he would yell at Wilma. “Stop digging post-holes! Stop pounding. Stride! No clenched fists! Open palms!” She stuck with it, and by the next fall, barely sixteen, she was running a leg with the Tigerbelles on the bronze-winning relay team in Melbourne.
Heriwentha (Mae) Faggs, the first of Temple’s great Tigerbelles, was eight years older than Wilma and served as her big sister during those early days in track. They were opposites in many ways: Faggs was loud and fiery, a confident woman from Bayside, Queens, who barely stood five feet; Wilma was a shy country girl who towered nearly a foot above her mentor. But Faggs fully empathized with the teenager’s situation. She had been only sixteen herself at the 1948 Olympics in London. Now she was so protective of the other Tigerbelles that they called her Mother Mae. “Skeeter, you do everything I do. Mae will take care of you,” Faggs told her when she joined the relay team. Rudolph readily agreed and followed Faggs around, copying her every move. When it came time to run the 200-meter final at the 1956 Olympic Trials, Faggs instructed her, “We’ll run around the turn, and by the time we get off the turn, we’ll start kicking. I’m gonna holler, you hear?” “All right, Mae,” Rudolph responded. In an oral history, Faggs recalled what happened next:
“Just like I said, because she was just a lane over from me, I turned my head to say, ‘Come on, Skeeter.’ And she said, ‘OK, Mae, I’m coming.’ We were coming down the straightaway when I turned my head back, but Skeeter was about a stride in front of me. She looked, and it shocked her so, she slowed down. I said, ‘Oh, buddy, you did the wrong thing. Never slow down for Mae.’ I kicked off. After the race, I told her, ‘I said do everything I do, but I didn’t tell you to beat me!’”
When the Tigerbelles returned from Australia with bronze medals, a young reporter for the Nashville Tennessean named David Halberstam was assigned to write a feature story about them. The Melbourne Olympics represented an end and a beginning: the last race in the fine career of Faggs, and a promising debut for the high school phenom Rudolph, who had run the crucial third leg. Halberstam, only twenty-two himself, was of their generation, and track had been his best sport at Roosevelt High in Yonkers, New York. A young writer of great enthusiasms, he was thrilled by the opportunity to talk to the local Olympians and recount their story. For the rest of his life, he could remember driving over to the Tennessee State campus and meeting Coach Temp
le and the Tigerbelles, but what would stick most clearly in his mind was an unsettling exchange after he returned to the newsroom. Born and reared in the Northeast, barely a year out of editing the Harvard Crimson, Halberstam was still discovering the racist assumptions embedded deep into the cultural geology of the South. He considered the Tennessean a progressive paper, mostly on the good side of the civil rights struggle, yet here was a veteran desk editor scratching a word out of his copy. Halberstam had called the college runners “coeds.” Years later, some women might object to the word for sounding sexist, but in this time and place the editor had a different problem. Coeds is a term reserved for white girls, Halberstam was told. “You can’t call these colored girls coeds.”
For the next year, Wilma was the most famous student at Burt High: world-class sprinter and star basketball player on one of the fastest, highest-scoring teams in Tennessee. As a junior, Skeeter led her team to the State Negro Basketball Tournament in Nashville, averaging more than thirty-two points a game, and gained renown for her furious fast breaks and unblockable hook shot. In her senior year, she and her boyfriend, Robert Eldridge, discovered that she was pregnant. “I was mortified,” she said later. “Pregnant? I couldn’t understand it. Robert and I had just started to get involved in sex, and here I was pregnant. We were both innocent about sex, didn’t know anything about birth control or about contraceptives.” Coach Temple feared that her running career might be over prematurely. He thought it would be difficult for her to recover from the harsh disapproval of her community. “She was a hero with them, and when they found out she was pregnant, they just said, ‘Well, she done threw away all of her opportunity.’ And everyone knew that I had a rule then that we didn’t want any expectant mothers, or didn’t want any runners with children. This was the fifties, and times were different then. She graduated and was expecting, and walked across the stage six or seven months pregnant and got her diploma.”
Later that summer, after spending a day with Wilma and her parents in Clarksville, Temple realized that her determination was stronger than his no-babies rule. Polio, racism, teenage mother-hood—no single obstacle could stop her. “She wanted to prove to the community that she didn’t let them down, and I think that’s what gave her the extra push, the extra determination to want to win.”
Now, on this Friday afternoon two years later in Rome, her moment of proof neared. It was time to enter the Stadio Olimpico for the finals of the 100-meter dash. Temple was so nervous that he was “about to climb the fence.” Then he looked across the stadium’s training room to the rubdown table. What worries? Most of his runners were “really fidgety” in that situation, but not Wilma. She had fallen fast asleep.
UNTIL WILMA RUDOLPH awoke from her nap, the Olympic talk all day had been about the hell of the afternoon before. Arthur Daley had descended into the underworld of Dante’s “Inferno” to describe the “Stygian gloom” of America’s loss for readers in the New York Times. It seemed that “ancient Roman gods had reached through the centuries to deliver a hex on the barbarians from across the sea.” Or maybe there was a baser explanation, one more commonplace in accounts of the fall of man. Could it all be explained by the banner on the front page of the Detroit Times?
“Wine, Women Blamed for U.S. Olympic Flop” ran the headline over a UPI dispatch containing all the essential ingredients of Olympian melodrama. First the writer dredged up the “wine, women, and song” trope, then he combined it mixed-metaphorically with a reference to “yesterday’s Pearl Harbor performance by the U.S. team.” Next he rounded up an unidentified U.S. official to squeal on the off-field behavior of the losing athletes. “The boys have been living it up too high,” said the official. “Just the other night I got back to the village at two in the morning. A taxi with about six members of the track team came in right behind me.” And as a clincher, the nightlife of the carousing Americans was set in stark contrast with the training propriety of the otherwise evil Soviets: “You can’t catch any Russians out dancing after ten!” the official harrumphed.
As odds-on favorites who lost badly, Ray Norton and John Thomas were the main targets of criticism. Both found the charges ridiculous. “I’ve been going to bed early—too early,” Norton said. “Anyone who says I’ve been staying out late is a big liar.” His coach, Bud Winter, slept down the hall in the men’s dorm, he added. “The coach says good night to me every night. They’re trying to make excuses for my bad time yesterday, and that is no excuse.” For his part, Thomas, who had been accused of “spending too much time on Rome’s glittering Via Veneto, the street of a thousand tables and gaiety,” said that most of his visits there were with his parents and younger sister and brother, who were enjoying their first trip abroad. “I was all eyes; I never got tired,” Thomas said later, adding that his parents got him back to his dorm even earlier than the Russians. There was plenty of horsing around, but nothing unusual for robust athletes buzzing with sexual energy. The dance floor at the village was always hopping. Lance Larson and a few swimming pals borrowed a pack of village motorbikes for a few hours to tool around the ancient piazzas, young women clinging to their backs. And as it turned out, a taxi stuffed with frolicking Americans had indeed pulled up to the village gates at two one morning, but its occupants included shot-putters who had already competed and some discus men and pole-vaulters whose events were still days away. As for wine, the alcohol consumption of journalists and Olympic officials was oceanic compared to the small pond of furtive drinking among some athletes.
There was something about Thomas’s personality, the way he reacted to loss, that played into the frustrations of those journalists and officials who expected him to win. They wanted him to be angry and expressive, to show some fight in his battle with the Soviets. Instead he reacted like it was just another day, no big deal. As he explained later, his thinking was, he missed the jump, what else was there to say? “It was not like the world was going to end and everything come crashing down. Either you make it or you don’t.” But after he missed, he could sense immediately that people looked at him differently. He thought they were projecting and fantasizing about how they would feel in that situation, and wanted him to feel the same way. “All the stories the reporters wrote were concocted by them. It had nothing to do with me,” he said. He sensed their aggression, sometimes bordering on hostility. What happened? Were you partying too much on the Via Veneto? Were you wearing the wrong shoes? Were you not getting enough sleep? They had to have explanations. And the intensity was only greater because he had lost to the Russians.
Even the Soviet press seemed to be piling on. Two radio commentators from Moscow and a correspondent from Pravda tracked down Thomas near his dorm room in the village that Friday afternoon.
“Tell us about yesterday,” one of them began.
“What do you want me to say?” he answered.
“What do you think of the Russian jumpers?”
“I think anyone who jumps seven feet is good.”
When the Soviets turned to leave, Eddy Gilmore of the Associated Press followed them. The Olympic competition was as much mental as physical, they told him, and Thomas was the victim of a psychological defeat. They were laughing when they said it.
As much as Thomas tried to convince himself that it was over and he could move on, he started to discover on the first day after Black Thursday that his image was forever stuck in the floodlights of the high-jump pit at the moment he failed to clear 7-1. The important thing in the Olympics is not winning, but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well. That was the creation myth of the modern Games, the Olympic Creed that founder Pierre de Coubertin first uttered in 1908. In his own phlegmatic way, Thomas tried to live by those words, but the outside world would not let him, especially in the vitriolic context of the cold war. It was much easier to enjoy the taking part and to endure the losing with no one paying attention, without expectations, like his high-jump teammate Joe Faust. For the great John Thomas, though,
what followed were days of questions, years of hate mail, constant reminders that he had lost—and a persistent nagging feeling that life would have been so much easier with a gold medal in Rome.
Winning, rather than just taking part, was by no means only an American obsession. Word also spread that Friday about a Greco-Roman wrestler from Bulgaria who threw a match to help a Russian win the gold medal. The gesture of Iron Curtain submissiveness happened amid the glorious fourth-century ruins of the Basilica di Massenzio, which the Italian hosts had ingeniously transformed into a three-mat wrestling venue, replete with floodlights, outdoor grandstands, and a row of twenty telephone booths for deadline journalists. Late in a semifinal match between Dimitro Stoyanov of Bulgaria and Avtandil Koridze of the Soviet Union, with the score tied and both wrestlers facing elimination from gold medal contention if it ended in a draw, Stoyanov suddenly seemed to lose his fighting will. His dive allowed Koridze to win and kept the gold medal away from Branislav Martinovic of Yugoslavia. Almost alone among Eastern Europeans, the Bulgarians were thought to be loyal to the Soviets to the point of athletic obedience. Yugoslavia and Hungary, by contrast, took pride in beating the Big Reds. Only four years earlier, at the 1956 Melbourne Games, Hungary defeated the USSR 4-0 in water polo just after the Soviets had crushed the Hungarian revolution. That confrontation was the stuff of legend, contested with such ferocity that it became known thereafter as the “Blood in the Water” match.
The Russians now denied a wrestling fix. “Any such suspicion is completely unfounded,” declared their Olympic spokesman, Nikolai Lubomirov. But René Coulon of France, the president of the International Wrestling Association, had little doubt about what had occurred. “I was personally at the match when the two men were wrestling. They fought magnificently for eleven minutes. Then I saw the Bulgarian take a look at the clock. A few seconds later he let himself fall on his back. I immediately stopped the match and had the international technical committee meet on the case. They decided to disqualify the Bulgarian and give one penalty point to the Russian.” They could not disqualify the Russian, who went on to win gold, Coulon said, because they could not prove that the Soviets were complicit in the scheme. Emrc Vehei, a Turkish wrestling official, agreed, though he believed the Russians were in on it. “This is a real slap in the face of true sportsmanship,” he said. “Nobody can be absolutely sure, but our past experience has taught us that the Bulgarians and Russians have performed such things in past international matches.”
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