Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  Inside the Stadio Olimpico, for a fleeting moment, Boston looked across the infield and caught the eye of Wilma Rudolph. Quite a day for little Tennessee State.

  Only twenty minutes earlier, Rudolph had been awakened by the sound of Coach Temple’s voice. “Time to wake up, Wilma. Time to run! Time to run!” She got up, yawned, and said “OK, I’m ready,” and slowly put on her shoes, taking her time as though nothing in the world awaited her. Finally she grabbed her starting blocks and strolled outside. No one should ever be in a hurry, Wilma thought, unless they hear the gun, and the footrace is on. Now here she was, preparing for the 100, No. 17 on her back. From a distance, she seemed all legs and hips in her uniform of short white shorts and blue shirt with red trim. She was the only American in the final six. The defending champion, Betty Cuthbert of Australia, had pulled up lame in the preliminaries, but Rudolph still had to beat Maria Itkina of the Soviet Union, Giuseppina Leone of Italy, Dorothy Hyman and Jennifer Smart of Great Britain, and Catherine Capdevielle of France.

  From his vantage point at the opening of the tunnel, Temple could see only part of the track—the starting blocks and about the first thirty meters. Just get on the stand, he said to himself as Rudolph unlimbered in Lane 3. Just get up there on the stand.

  Aposti. Via. And the gun. She started slowly. At 30 meters, when she disappeared from Temple’s view, he wasn’t sure but had a good feeling. At the halfway point, Fred Russell, the hometown columnist, noticed that Wilma was breaking free with “her long stride and blazing speed.” Red Smith scribbled “leggy doll” and “syrupy stride.” No one ran quite like the high-waisted Skeeter: loose, light, with beautiful form. She broke the tape a full three strides and three-tenths of a second ahead of Hyman, who finished second, and Leone, a close third. As Rudolph slowed down past the finish, the slightest remnant of a limp was evident from the twisted ankle. She stopped abruptly, turned around, and walked back toward the start, hands on hips, catching her breath, as Hyman and Leone rushed over for quick congratulations.

  “Wilma won! Wilma won!” someone shouted to Temple in the tunnel. “You’re joking,” he said. Then he stepped into the golden late afternoon sunlight, and “they flashed it on the big scoreboard and put the time, the new Olympic record, ‘Wilma Rudolph USA,’ and I said, ‘Hot Dog!’”

  The time was 11 flat, the fastest ever, crushing Cuthbert’s 11.4 in Melbourne and her own 11.3 in the Rome semifinals. It would have been a world and Olympic record, but there was too much wind pushing her for the record to count, officials said. The breeze was blowing at 4.75 miles per hour, exceeding the allowable 4.473. Halfway down the track on her return to the starting blocks, she began running again, a happy lope. She jumped into the arms of Earlene Brown, the dancing shot-putter (between throws of her competition, on the way to winning a bronze), then found a spot on a bench in the shade to rest and soak it in. Her teammate Barbara Jones, who had been eliminated by a narrow margin in the semifinals, came over with a brush and comb and helped Wilma compose herself. Foxes not oxes.

  Out came Avery Brundage, with his gray suit and wet lips, for the medals ceremony. With a single long step, the champion Tigerbelle climbed from behind the podium to stand on the top rung. Wearing her blue sweat suit and holding a straw USA hat, she bowed to receive the gold medal. The crowd was hers, roaring. The American flag rose high, the “Star-Spangled Banner” played, and Wilma Rudolph waved, stepped off the podium, and ran away, her medal bouncing against her chest, the wind gently blowing in her face.

  12

  LIBERATION

  WHAT a bella festa the Rome Olympics are, thought Gian Paolo Ormezzano, the young journalist covering his first Games for Tuttosport. There was work to be done, but in the atmosphere of a wonderful party. The city was sultry and enchanting. The organizing committee was so efficient that even the Germans could not complain. Despite the political tensions of the cold war, there seemed to be a prevailing spirit of hope and freedom. Venues were accessible, athletes approachable, restaurants and bars abundant, stories everywhere. Each day seemed an affirmation to Ormezzano that the people of the world could coexist: Americans and Soviets, East Germans and West Germans, Indians and Pakistanis. Conflict outside the Olympic bubble might appear irresolvable, but here he even saw Israeli and Arab athletes walking arm in arm. One day he pursued a report that a woman police officer had been attacked in the male section of the Olympic Village, but it proved to be unsubstantiated rumor. Aside from the usual complaints about biased judges, the biggest misunderstanding he witnessed was when a well-known Norwegian journalist got so drunk that he cabled his article to the wrong newspaper, which recognized his famous byline and puckishly published his dispatch on its front page.

  Ormezzano’s assignment was to cover the swimming competition, but on the Saturday afternoon of September 3 he took a seat in the Stadio Olimpico to watch the final of the men’s 200-meter dash. A field of seventy-one runners had been narrowed to six, and the surviving runner who drew him to the event was Livio Berruti, a fellow Italian and close family friend from Torino who had attended the same school and was in his brother’s class.

  Berruti was another of those Olympians like Wilma Rudolph, Peter Radford, and Frank Budd who underwent the metamorphosis from sickly child to world-class sprinter. It was not polio in his case, but severe allergies and bronchitis. Now he was the Torino Express, a tall, pale, strong-legged twenty-one-year-old whose image was already familiar at the Olympics and worldwide, largely due to an unforgettable wirephoto that ran in hundreds of newspapers showing him rounding the curve in a preliminary heat just as a pigeon took flight a yard away on the inside lane. A few pigeons had been loitering around the stadium for more than a week, since their release at the Opening Ceremony. “It was an unusual photo,” British writer Neil Allen jotted down in his diary, “but the flutter of the gentle bird’s wings and the silken stride of the sprinter go together. Grace, swiftness, fluency are words that I find synonymous with Berruti.”

  There was one other thing about Berruti that made him stand out: he ran in sunglasses. Decades later, shades would become the trademark of sprinter cool (as well as a form of profitable sponsorship), but Berruti was ahead of his time. And though he looked jazzy, that is not why he wore them. He wore glasses—regular indoors, tinted in the sun—because he needed them. Without them he was so shortsighted that he could see neither other runners nor the finish line. The sunglasses he brought to the track were the ones he wore every day, “nothing special for competing,” he later explained.

  Nearly an hour before the 200 final, the other five sprinters arrived at the track to warm up, but Berruti stayed behind in the cool of the dressing room. He had run the best race of his life in the semifinals earlier that day, recording such a fast time that he became concerned about exhausting his energy and good karma. Alone and out of the heat, he made a point of “doing nothing” for a half hour, before finally emerging to hammer in his blocks and practice his starts. In the minutes just before the race, the air around the track sparked with compressed tension and gamesmanship. Was Berruti so sure of winning that he didn’t have to go through the warm-up routine with his fellow runners? Was he trying to psyche out the others, or was he too detached, overconfident? Had the Americans lost their cockiness, if not their nerve?

  Three of the six runners wore USA uniforms. Ray Norton was there, seeking redemption, along with teammates Les Carney and Stone Johnson. The 200 had always been Dave Sime’s best event, but he had failed to qualify at the Olympic Trials and was nowhere near the Stadio Olimpico on this Saturday afternoon. He and Jim Beatty, the injured distance runner who had bombed out in the heats for the 5000, had escaped with their wives down to Sorrento and Capri for the weekend. The head track coach, Larry Snyder, had instructed Sime to stay in Rome, but Dave rarely listened to the coaches. “Snyder was a real prick,” he said later. “I didn’t like him at all. He was arrogant. And he didn’t like me. I was older and very independent, and he told me, ‘I won’t run y
ou if I catch you being out late.’” Rather than get to bed late, Sime decided it would be better not to go to bed at all.

  With Sime gone to the coast and Armin Hary also skipping the 200 to concentrate on the 4 x 100 relay later in the week, Ray Norton had convinced himself that he could win. He knew Berruti from competing against him on the Scandinavian circuit in 1959. Although Norton would later say that they were pals and recall how they taught each other words of English and Italian, the American would not acknowledge that past friendship before the race. When Berruti walked over to shake hands with Norton, Carney, and Johnson, they quickly brushed him off and huddled among themselves, turning inward as though to escape the pressure. “Usually the Americans were relaxed and friendly, but they were upset about losing the hundred meters, and were tense and closed,” Berruti recalled.

  Perhaps because it was a Saturday, and many tourists were on side trips to the coast, the bowl of Stadio Olimpico was less than two-thirds full. The German choristers were missing, replaced by Italians cheering their local favorite as he prepared to enter the blocks. Berruti! Ber-ru-ti! Ber-ru-ti! From their row in the stands, Cord Nelson of Track & Field News and his family found the sound joyful, for some reason so much less threatening than German chants for Hary. Even the soda vendor in their section got into the spirit of the moment and charmed young Nancy Nelson by calling out “Coca-Cola! Acqua minerale! Ber-ru-ti!” Then silence until the gun.

  In Lane 4, Berruti got a good jump. He was ahead at 70 meters, and stretched out as he approached the curve. “Berruti runs the curve better than anyone else,” Neil Allen recorded in his diary. Shouts of “Italia! Italia! Ber-ru-ti! Ber-ru-ti!” echoed through the stadium. Berruti remembered that during the semifinals, he had eased up after the turn and told himself not to do that again. He had to lengthen his stride and keep himself under control. In the press box, the Italian journalists were overwrought. One collapsed in a faint. In the final stretch, Norton faded. Stone Johnson fell back with him. Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese running under the flag of France, kicked past Marian Foik of Poland. Les Carney came up on the outside. Berruti blocked out the roar of the crowd, but his ears were keenly sensitive as he listened for footfalls behind him. He approached the finish line knowing that he still held the lead, and threw himself at it, sprawling onto the dark red track, overcome “with that kind of liberation you feel when you’ve faced a difficult test and managed to pass it.”

  With a new Olympic record of 20.5 seconds, tying the world mark, Berruti won gold, with Carney taking silver and Seye bronze. Berruti, his knees and elbows slightly bruised but his sunglasses unharmed by the fall, bounded up and was hugged by Seye, who had run over to congratulate him. “He was very simpatico,” Berruti said of Seye. The Americans seemingly were not. They stayed to themselves, crestfallen, as the celebration erupted around them. The exhilaration of the Italians in the stands was unforgettable, a moment remembered by Don Graham, the Post copyboy. “They just exploded. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced,” he said. Cord Nelson was sitting amid a battalion of Italians who made torches from newspapers and waved their firebrands as they shouted “Ber-ru-ti! Berruti! Ber-ru-ti!” again and again for five minutes until three young Italian women carried out the medals for the presentation by Prince Axel of Denmark. The one carrying Berruti’s gold medal wept. The band played “Fidelia Italia,” with gusto.

  Ormezzano was so overcome that he hopped the fence, scuttled across the small dry moat, and scampered onto the field to hug his friend. The journalist was in tears, but the sprinter seemed serene, almost cold. “The problem is that I’m very shy, and when I won, I didn’t know what to do,” Berruti said later. “I wasn’t ‘cold,’ I was embarrassed by the acclaim.” He was a national hero now. Officials escorted him to the field box holding Italian dignitaries. One after another they kissed him on both cheeks.

  Off to the side stood Ray Norton chewing on a piece of fruit. Two races, two last-place finishes. Jesse Owens he was not. He had tried as hard as he could—too hard, he now thought. It made him “tied up again like a knot.” As he stood talking to Les Carney, Rafer Johnson approached, patted Norton on the back, and said, “You’ll get ’em next time, champ.” Norton turned and saw a wide smile on Johnson’s face, and it temporarily lifted him out of his funk. “Rafer is carrying his own load,” Norton thought. He’s got C. K. Yang waiting on him. But he’s the team leader, like a big brother to everyone, and just his presence and a few words of support were inspirational.

  “There were a lot of reasons I did that,” Johnson explained later. “First of all, I was the captain, and I felt I needed to do that. And in particular I had to do it in his case. Wilma was a really good friend of mine, and Wilma was very close with Ray. And from what I went through in 1956, all of my teammates who had performances that were less than expected, for the most part I knew how they felt. I wanted to reach out because I had that experience in fifty-six. There’s not a whole lot to be said. I just wanted to touch him and let him know there would be other days when he would have the opportunity to show the world what he could do, and this just wasn’t the time. I went over to him and physically wanted to put my hands on him and let him know that I understood. You know you can just have a bad day. A bad twenty seconds. And sometimes it turns into an hour, turns into a day, into two days. Once you start spiraling down that road, it is hard to reverse it. Just so hard, and it becomes so hard because you try too hard. And it starts affecting everything. How you think and how you talk and how you move, and pretty soon you are messed up.”

  On the way out of the stadium, Norton was met in the tunnel again by Wilma Rudolph. Raymond Johnson of the Nashville Tennessean, working on a column about the Tigerbelle, stood nearby.

  “Don’t worry, honey, you did all right,” Rudolph said.

  Norton threw his track shoes in disgust and collapsed onto a bench next to her. “I did awful. I just can’t explain it. I just don’t know what’s the matter.”

  The crowd backed away, giving them privacy. Looking for some way to console her friend, Rudolph offered to give him the gold medal she had won the day before. No thanks, he said. She might need it some day to prove that she had really won the 100. But that was the kind of person she was, Norton thought to himself. She thought of others so much that she would even give away her gold medal.

  As they rose from the bench, Rudolph reminded him to pick up his shoes.

  “I don’t want the shoes,” Norton said. “I never want to see them again.”

  Livio Berruti was leaving the stadium at about that time. He did not comprehend the meaning of his victory until then, when he was surrounded by a phalanx of carabinieri. What did he need with these officers? The answer became obvious when he stepped outside the gates. Hundreds of Italian fans pushed forward, clamoring to shake his hand or just catch a glimpse of the Torino Express.

  EARLY THAT evening at the Palazzetto dello Sport, a sellout crowd gathered for the most anticipated basketball match of the Games, the United States versus the Soviet Union. Tickets were so tight that James D. Zellerbach, the U.S. ambassador to Rome, had to make a personal plea to Avery Brundage to secure seats for his family. The little arena was so overflowing, noted Braven Dyer of the Los Angeles Times, that “if you took a deep breath, you were apt to shove somebody off the next seat. Rabid fans jammed the aisles and occupied every inch of standing room.” Some of the best views in the house ended up belonging to Bill Nieder and Dallas Long, gold and bronze medalists in the shot put, who had arrived without tickets but were corralled by Pete Newell, given USA warm-up suits, and placed down at the end of the bench. Newell was not expecting trouble, but it never hurt to have two musclemen nearby.

  The United States, where basketball was invented in 1891, had dominated Olympic competition going back to the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, when the Buffalo Germans, a team of six young men from a YMCA on the east side of Buffalo, won the championship. With basketball in its infancy and most countries still learning the r
ules, the St. Louis contests were merely exhibitions. The sport became an official Olympic event at the 1936 games in Berlin, where the USA won the gold medal by defeating Canada 19–8 on an outdoor packed-dirt court that turned muddy in a rainstorm. The Americans had never lost an Olympic match since, but going into Rome some observers said their basketball dynasty could be vulnerable, especially against the Russians.

  Stepan Spandarian, the short, gray-haired Soviet coach, had issued a warning earlier that summer. “We can beat the Americans at the game they invented,” he said. He thought he had reasons to be optimistic. At the world championship in Santiago, Chile, in 1959, a U.S. team had lost to both the Soviet Union and Brazil, an unprecedented failure that was described in the New York Times as a “propaganda defeat of the first magnitude.” If U.S. prestige suffered from the Santiago fiasco, the losses there did not necessarily foreshadow long-term collapse. Construction delays in Chile had postponed the world championship for several months, and by the time they were held, the Americans were preoccupied with other responsibilities. Not an all-star team but a mediocre air force squad was finally sent, with predictable results. Spandarian was further encouraged when the Soviets toured the U.S. as part of the US-USSR Exchange Agreement and held their own against the best AAU teams. He knew the skills of Bob Boozer, Burdette Haldorson, Lester Lane, and Allen Kelley, all U.S. Olympians from the AAU ranks, but had no scouting reports on the American collegians. Of Oscar Robertson, he said, “He is only six-five. He cannot worry us as much as Bill Russell did at Melbourne.” The Soviets were taller and faster than ever, Spandarian claimed, and could run and shoot in the style of the West. One Soviet journalist, sharing the coach’s confidence, went so far as to bet an American writer a bottle of vodka on the outcome.