The boxer was about to dig in when he noticed a caravan of convertibles easing along the village roadway outside the cafeteria window. Who’s that? he asked. Simes said he thought it was Belinda Lee and some English movie star, and that he had heard that Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly were also supposed to be visiting the athletes sometime soon. He had read about it in the village newsletter that morning—all these film stars were coming. “With that he bolts from the chair and heads straight for the door without saying a word,” Simes wrote of Clay in his diary. “The trainer yells, ‘Come back here! You haven’t touched your food! That Polack’s gonna beat the hell out of you!’ Then, raising his voice, adds, ‘He’s the European champ, you know!’ This has no effect either. The boxer never looked back, the trainer left, and I ate lunch by myself.”
After lunch, the clouds over Rome dropped the first rain. “You have to be in Rome on a rainy day to know what real sadness is,” wrote Edouard Seidler, correspondent for France’s national sports newspaper, L’Équipe. “Rome is lugubrious during a storm. It is only made for sunny days.” This first spray of rain was not enough to disrupt outdoor Olympic events, but it served as a warning of things to come. Yet if the dreary sky enveloped the ancient city with a mood of sorrow and heaviness, as Seidler said, that sensibility did not seem to make it into the stadium.
It was almost three o’clock when Rafer Johnson returned to the infield “determined to make up for lost ground” in the shot put, one of his best events. While it would be unfair to characterize him as primarily a strongman, it was indisputable that his decathlon prowess was built around the throwing events: shot put, discus, and javelin. Unlike most throwers, his legs were surprisingly spindly—“they are legs of a runner rather than a muscle man,” noted Fred Russell—but he had a powerful upper body. A few seconds of exertion followed by long spells of sit-around-and-wait is the usual frustration of shot-putters, and with so many competitors, the down time was more frustrating than ever now, especially after Johnson disappointed himself with a poor first throw. Red Smith, if he was paying attention, must have felt reassured by the tedium. But when Johnson’s turn came around again, he heaved the shot 51 feet 103/4 inches, worth 976 points and surpassing Yang’s best effort by more than 8 feet. This brought a dramatic turnaround in the overall scoring; from 130 points down, Rafer now, with that single showing, grabbed the lead by 143 points. He felt he would need every bit of that cushion going into the fourth event of the day, his worst, the high jump.
The shot put turned out to be the end for David Edstrom. The pain in his groin was too much for him now, and there was nothing he could do about it. All those hours on the makeshift decathlon course out at his Oregon tree farm had come to this—after three events in Rome, he had to drop out.
As a morning-to-night enterprise, the decathlon had to fit around a busy schedule of other events inside Stadio Olimpico, some that drew more attention that day. By a quarter to five the stadium was nearing capacity in anticipation of two major races: first the men’s 110-meter hurdles, then the women’s 200. The throaty German hordes had returned in full force for the hurdles, there to support Martin Lauer, who had set the world record at 13.2 seconds earlier that year, a mark matched by American Lee Calhoun during the pre-Olympic meet in Bern. In the Olympic final, those two were joined by Willie May and Hayes Jones of the U.S. team along with Keith Gardner of the West Indies and Valentin Chistiakov of the Soviet Union.
Calhoun, the defending gold medalist had spent the summer convinced that he could set a new world mark of 13.1. All of his training had been geared toward that record time. He was supremely confident about his form clearing the hurdles and felt that his only concern was speed. His amazing race in Switzerland, he told his wife, Gwen, who accompanied him to Rome, could have been even a tenth of a second faster, and in any case was just a warm-up for what he would do now.
Gwendolyn Bannister Calhoun certainly hoped that her husband was ready. As a spouse, it was natural for her to root hard for him, but in her case the race in Rome had a stronger personal meaning, a matter of the couple’s redemption. They had been college sweethearts since meeting at a school dance at North Carolina College at Durham (later renamed North Carolina Central University), a predominantly black school with a first-rate track program led by the brilliant coach LeRoy T. Walker, who in later years would serve as both president of the university and the first African-American head of the U.S. Olympic Committee. After a few years together, when Lee was graduating, he and Gwen decided to get married. They had no money for a wedding or honeymoon, even though Lee had reached international stardom by then with his gold medal in Melbourne. According to Gwen, Coach Walker one day mentioned to her that they should try to get on Bride and Groom, a daytime television show where young couples were married on the air and given various gifts and a free honeymoon. “LeRoy said this might be something good for you. He showed me what you had to do to be on the show. If they enjoyed your letter, they would put you on the show. Mine must have been a humdinger,” Gwen said later. “I didn’t tell Lee about it until I knew for sure. He thought it was wonderful. We knew we didn’t have anything; didn’t even have a job. [But] it was my choice. Lee didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Gwen and Lee were scheduled to appear on Bride and Groom on Friday, August 9, 1958. Eight days before the wedding, Dan Ferris, head of the Amateur Athletic Union, heard about the program and declared that Calhoun would lose his amateur status if he got married on the show and accepted any gifts. Then Ferris revised his position to make it even stronger: Calhoun would lose his amateur status even if he went on the show but did not take gifts. Using the same argument he made in telling Rafer Johnson that he could not take an acting role in the movie Spartacus, Ferris argued that Calhoun was unduly benefiting from his status as an athlete and that the couple would not have been invited on Bride and Groom had he not been a track star.
Calhoun desperately wanted to maintain his amateur status—he was already pointing toward the 1960 Olympics—but he thought Ferris’s ruling was unfair. Anyone could be on the TV show, not just athletes, he said. And everyone enjoyed the right to get married in the style they wanted and to accept gifts for the wedding. What if friends wanted to give a wedding gift of money for a honeymoon? Would that be illegal?
When Gwen heard about the AAU announcement, she tried to talk Lee out of going through with the television show. “I didn’t want him suspended. I thought about just getting married on my parents’ lawn,” she recalled. But by then Calhoun was adamant, and Roger Gimbel, the producer of Bride and Groom, had come to his defense, bringing in NBC lawyers to make an appeal to the track officials. “The main argument [we] made I think was telling at the time,” Gimbel remembered. “This is a free country, and you should be able to get married any way you want to—it’s your business and not the Olympic Committee’s business. Also, [we made] the argument that it was the bride, not the groom, who received the presents. It was just a shocking decision. I felt it was really embarrassing. I felt like, ‘this poor guy!’”
After meeting with Calhoun and NBC’s lawyers, Ferris remained unmoved. He called the whole show a “publicity stunt.” Calhoun, in an interview with the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, said he would not back down either. “I will appear on the show regardless of what the outcome will be,” he said. “I feel my decision is right, and I will appeal the case if Ferris goes through with the threatened revocation.”
In front of a national television audience, the Calhouns were married as planned on August 9. Lee’s stepfather, a minister, performed the ceremony. Gwen got to choose her own gown (“It was gorgeous,” she said later). A few friends and family were there, along with a famous stranger, someone who had never met Lee or Gwen, yet came to support them. It was none other than Jackie Robinson, the trail-blazing black baseball player who had broken the national pastime’s color barrier in 1947. Now retired, he worked for Chock full o’Nuts, a popular New York City lunch-counter coffee chain. L
ee did most of the talking on the air, answering questions about their lives and romance. Then came the gifts: silverware, china, a sewing machine, gold watches, a freezer full of frozen foods, perfume, a vacuum cleaner, a carpet, plane tickets and traveler’s checks for the honeymoon in Paris, and an aboveground swimming pool that they had no room or use for and donated to the Boys Club of America.
Dan Ferris threw in the additional present of standing by his threat and revoking the hurdler’s amateur track status. After the Calhouns’ time in Paris, where a photographer from Ebony followed them around, the couple moved to Cleveland, where Lee took a job in the city recreation department working with tough juveniles. If money was at the root of his problem, it was also the way out, as it happened. Midwestern chapters of the AAU were so upset with the decision that they threatened to withhold contributions to the national headquarters unless Calhoun was given another chance. In December 1958 his indefinite suspension was cut to one year. He returned to training and by the summer of 1959 was back on the track that led him to this wet and overcast Monday afternoon inside Stadio Olimpico—where he had a chance to become the first 110-meter hurdler to win consecutive gold medals, and certainly the first to overcome the obstacle of being a television groom.
Rome’s new red track was soft and slow from the earlier rain, and a strong wind blew directly into the faces of the hurdlers as they took their marks. Calhoun had been pointing toward a record time, but there was little chance of that now. He and teammate Willie May lined up side by side in the two inside lanes. At the gun, Calhoun took the lead, then hit the first hurdle, something he rarely did, and was thrown slightly off stride. Lauer knocked the same hurdle, and then the fourth and fifth as well, and was in fourth place as they reached the homestretch, the German barrackers in the stands chanting his name in vain. May, a lanky six-three, had caught Calhoun and was running even with him as they neared the tape. In Melbourne, the race had been a photo finish, with Calhoun winning because of his lean at the tape. Now it came down to a lean again. Watching in the stands, Bert Nelson noted that May’s long lean reminded him of the one Calhoun had used in Melbourne. Almost, but not quite. “Calhoun, who possibly more than any other man has popularized and improved the lean, was not to be outdone at his own game,” Nelson wrote. “Bending until his upper body was almost horizontal, Calhoun actually took the string with his head. But heads don’t count, and the judges had to view the photos.”
Gwen Calhoun was a wreck watching the finish. “Whenever I watched him run, I was nervous. I remember when he hit the tape, he fell, rolled over, and got up. He doesn’t remember it because it was so quick. I asked if he had hurt himself, but he was up so fast he didn’t remember.” And she was more nervous waiting for the results. “We had to wait so long to find out who had won”—five minutes in that situation seeming like forever. “I just remember I kept looking up at the scoreboard. They had everyone else up there but Lee and Willie May.” Hayes Jones had finished third, winning bronze, barely edging out Lauer. Finally the scoreboard flashed the first two places. Calhoun first, May second. The time was way off, 13.8, but that was explainable by the poor conditions.
Two Olympics, two photo finishes, two gold medals.
Gwen started jumping up and down with joy. On the track, Lee felt flushed with vindication. “Winning in Melbourne meant a lot, but winning in Rome was a special achievement since no one else had ever won consecutive gold medals in high hurdles,” Calhoun said later. “I was out to prove I could do it, and with going through the suspension hassle, it gave me an especially good feeling.”
EARLIER IN the competition, Ed Temple’s greatest hope was just to get one of his runners on the medal stand. A bronze would do. But in the four days since Wilma Rudolph won gold in the 100, all of that had changed. From a relative unknown, Rudolph had risen to international stardom, belle of the Olympics, the favorite in anything she did. Even some of the Soviets said she was the most amazing figure, male or female, in the Games. It was not just the way she ran, so lean and flowing, but the combination of her physical skills, her biography, and the way she presented herself. Long before it became commonplace for the media to build Olympic coverage around a personality, much attention in Rome was being paid to the Wilma Rudolph story.
Wherever she went in the village or on the streets of Rome, she was quickly surrounded by adoring fans. “I’m afraid to go out in the morning,” she confessed to reporters one day. “They recognize me everywhere, whether I’m wearing a dress or my sweat suit.” And everywhere the fans wanted the same thing: a photograph with “la Gazella Nera”—the Black Gazelle. For a self-described lazybones who never wanted to exert more energy than the situation required, all the hoopla could have been too much. It had always been hard to get her to eat, and when she did eat it was usually some junk food, a hamburger and soda. Her mother, Coach Clinton Gray at Burt High, Coach Temple—all had tried to improve her eating habits, with little success, and now she was eating even less than usual. Her weight dropped from 140 down into the low 130s. Coach Temple kept urging her to “stay off those feet,” but there was always someplace to go and someone else who wanted to talk to her. Despite all that, Rudolph had the right disposition to handle the outside demands, as well as the added stress of watching her close friend Ray Norton fail so painfully on the track. It seemed that nothing could faze her.
As the Olympics progressed, it became apparent that Rudolph had grown into more than just a winning athlete with a winning personality. Her success had taken on a larger meaning, as a woman who had overcome the odds, and in that sense she was now an important symbol to her women teammates and all females in sports. Anne Warner, one of the “sweethearts” from the Santa Clara Swim Club who combined to win six gold medals among them (three for Chris von Saltza, two for Lynn Burke, and one for Warner), said that all the swimmers looked up to Rudolph and considered her an inspiration. They had read the stories about her life and watched her with reverence as she moved around the Olympic Village.
The sprinter’s childhood malady had a special meaning to them, Warner recalled later. “I had read the stories about her fight against polio and what she had done. She was really a hero for a lot of us. It didn’t matter that it was a different sport. She was just such a beautiful runner. And I think that polio was such a part of our lives then, too, because we were swimmers. A lot of times your parents were nervous about going to swimming pools in that era. And there was no Salk vaccine yet when we were starting out. So the fact that she had polio meant something special to us.”
Each swimmer seemed to have a personal story that deepened the connection to Rudolph. The great von Saltza’s father was a polio survivor who had trouble walking the rest of his life. His disability led to his daughter’s gold medals, in a sense: Chris first headed over to the local swimming pool as a youngster one summer when her father could not take the family on its annual vacation. Warner remembered facing her first polio threat before she entered kindergarten, when there was a widespread belief that the disease spread in swimming pools. “I think when I was five, I went swimming at a local pool and got a high fever, which was a sinus infection, and my mother rushed me to the doctor because they were having a polio scare in 1951. My pediatrician’s wife had been taken to the hospital that day to an iron lung from which she never came out. So that whole polio thing was personal for me, and the fact that Wilma Rudolph had overcome polio and become such a magnificent runner was remarkable.”
Soon after the 110-meter-hurdle results were announced, resolving the photo finish between Calhoun and May, Rudolph and her five competitors stepped out onto the slow track for the 200. Coach Temple had a good feeling now. “I felt after she won the hundred that she had a good chance to win the two hundred because she was a better two hundred runner,” he said later. “She could just run the curve so well, plus when she hit the straightaway, she could open up with her long legs and her fluid stride and…she was going to be awesome.” The 200 had been the source of Rudolp
h’s teenage disappointment, when she failed to survive the preliminary heats in Melbourne. But it had been her best race ever since. Before the qualifying heat in Rome, she was so confident that she asked Temple if it would be OK for her “to just loaf” if she had a good lead. Give it your all for 150 meters, Temple told her, then look around, and if you have a good lead, go ahead and coast. That is exactly what Wilma did, and it so happened that she coasted to an Olympic record time (23.2 seconds)—once again proving Temple’s maxim that you have to ease off to speed up.
For the final, she faced not only a slow track against a swirling wind, with ominous storm clouds forming overhead, but also was handicapped by being slotted in the far inside lane, where the curve in the 200 is tighter and more difficult for a long-limbed runner to negotiate. At the gun, she was slow out of the blocks but surged past the field at the curve and lengthened her lead with every stride down the straightaway. In the press section, the Brit, Neil Allen, had his binoculars trained on countrywoman Dorothy Hyman, who would finish third, but he was thrilled seeing Rudolph as she “went majestically away from the field.” Even the German fans, as they watched their own blond-haired Jutta Heine race for the silver in Lane 3, joined in the roar for the American.
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