Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  The time was ordinary, 24 seconds, but the victory was historic. From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome. When Raymond Johnson of the Tennessean went looking for her after the race, she was typically modest, saying she was glad it was over and that she had not run her best. “I meant to run faster in the finals,” she said. “But somehow when the race started, I just couldn’t get going any harder.” The joke was that she ran harder an hour later as she made her way back to the village with her Tigerbelle teammates Lucinda Williams, Barbara Jones, and Martha Hudson. As they approached the gates, a mob spotted Wilma and started toward her. But she had done enough for one day, and it looked like an electrical storm was about to hit, and she and her buddies just took off, sprinting away toward their dorm at record speed. They easily outdistanced everybody, Johnson noted, “including the rain, which they beat by fifteen yards.”

  By then the conditions inside Stadio Olimpico were a mess. First the sky grew dark, then papers started flying everywhere, thunder rumbled over the hills, lightning flashed, and in a rush down came the rain. It was about six o’clock, and the decathletes were set to begin their fourth event of the long day, the high jump. Perhaps Red Smith viewed this as welcome relief from his assignment covering the blasted event—he certainly seemed energized describing the “swooshing, pounding cataracts” of rain before skipping out with most of his colleagues and heading across town for the boxing finals. The stands cleared of all but the bravest souls. In their section, the last ones holding out were the Track & Field Nelson clan, covering their heads with rain gear and umbrellas. Young Nancy Nelson looked around and was shocked to see “the stadium was empty.” Her sister Rebecca took advantage of the emptiness by dashing all the way up the steps to the Olympic flame. Had it gone out? She thought so. Finally, Cord Nelson rounded up his brood and took them under cover below the stands, where they waited around with the few other diehards for the decathlon competition to resume.

  In a dank and crowded training room nearby, Rafer Johnson took shelter from the storm, surrounded by fellow decathletes, some of whom had thrown blankets on the floor. Rafer was exhausted already, and the high jump was his worst event, and now he had no idea when they would send him back out there. But he had trained mentally for moments like this, just as he had trained his body. Since that disappointment in Melbourne in 1956, he had thought a lot about the unexpected, about what he could control and what he could not control. “You better be prepared for something other than what you expect the situation to be,” he recalled. “And don’t be surprised if it very seldom turns out the way you think it’s going to. Whatever it turns out to be, if you are ready to deal with those changes, whatever they are, it can make you very tough. It can make you a very good competitor, because pretty soon it gets to be that whatever happens, you can deal with it. At that time, I didn’t have things in total control. But I was very tough.”

  THE RAINS continued, Rafer and C.K. waited, darkness fell on Rome, and the action moved across the city to the Palazzo dello Sport for the finals of the Olympic boxing matches. The new arena was a cylindrical marvel of modernist design, with every seat offering a clear view of the action and a brilliant shaft of light filtering down on the ring from the apex of the ceiling like a probing beam from a flying saucer about to land. But it could have been held in a cave, and it would have felt the same on this night; the joint was jumping, packed to the rafters with a standing-room-only crowd of more than eighteen thousand raucous boxing fans. Prized tickets were going for 6,000 lire (about $9.60 then), a price steeper than any ticket after the Opening Ceremony. There were smatterings of supporters for every country represented in the finals, but by far the dominant claque was Italian—loud, vociferous, on edge, ready at any time to burst into a chorus of joyous song (“as if every man in the audience was a Caruso,” noted the Englishman Neil Allen) or to unleash a volley of whistles and boos. They had come to cheer on the home squad, which had no fewer than six men going for gold out of ten classifications from flyweight to heavyweight. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ghana, and South Africa had one boxer apiece remaining, while the Soviets had three, the Poles four, and the U.S. three.

  “Those Italian fans are really rabid, especially in the boxing,” recalled Jerry Armstrong, the American bantamweight, who had already lost in the quarterfinals. Armstrong and teammate Nikos Spanakos, the featherweight who had been outpointed by a Russian ten days earlier, reached the arena that night on a bus carrying a troupe of already-beaten fighters from all over the world. Their shuttle from the village turned out to be as contentious as some of the sparring they would witness later. As Spanakos later remembered the scene, the bus driver took “a long, circuitous route” before eventually coming to a stop and announcing that he would go no farther unless they paid more money. “The Greeks said ‘No way, let’s jump him!’ They subsided and even offered to pay for me in the end, but they did not want to be ripped off. It was a long bus ride to get out there.”

  In the first five bouts, the Italian boxers won once and lost twice, and the partisan crowd was growing anxious. Then, in the welterweight match (148 pounds), Giovanni Benvenuti, already the European champ and considered the best hit man on the Italian team, scored the first knockdown of the night, flooring the Russian Yuri Radonyak in the first round. Radonyak got up and survived the full three rounds, eventually losing a 4–1 decision, but by then the crowd was delirious about Benvenuti. The arena still resounded with songs and loud cheers when the first American boxer, light middleweight Wilbert McClure, stepped into the ring to face another Italian, Carmelo Bossi of Milan. McClure was taller and had a longer reach than his opponent, but he started cautiously, letting the Italian land a few body punches in the first round. In the second round, Bossi could only get inside for clinches, constantly drawing the attention of the referee. In a freewheeling final round, McClure came out swinging and never stopped, landing a combination right-left that sent Bossi against the ropes, his knees buckling. Bossi flailed back until the final bell, most of his swings missing wildly, the crowd on its feet in a ceaseless roar. The gold medal went to McClure on a 4–1 decision, a resolution that the Italian crowd found hard to dispute but disliked intensely nonetheless, fouling the mood.

  That was the situation when another American, Eddie Crook, an army sergeant based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, entered the ring to face Poland’s Tadeusz Walasek. In the stands, Pete Newell, the U.S. basketball coach who had come to support the Yanks, sensed a “lot of anti-American feeling” bubbling up in the crowd. To Newell, it seemed rooted in ideology. He sensed there were many Italian Communists in the arena. “For some reason, they seemed to have a bigger audience in boxing of the radical element than they did at basketball or even track,” Newell said. Whether it was politics or merely boxing’s combustible mix of mob psychology and controlled violence, the Crook bout left no doubt as to the anti-American sentiments in the stands.

  Even more than McClure before him, Crook started his fight cautiously. He used what one boxing writer called a “sneaky left” to keep Walasek away while dodging the Pole’s occasional errant swings. From his press seat near ringside, Neil Allen was impressed by Crook’s style. “I thought Crook produced the best boxing of the evening, winning the first two rounds with crisp left jabbing and hooking and perhaps having to share the third when Walasek threw everything into a desperate counterattack.” Other impartial observers, while less effusive in their praise of Crook, thought he outfought Walasek and were not surprised when he was declared the winner. But the Italian crowd, which had been rooting loudly for the Pole—or against the American—and did not appreciate Crook’s deliberate style, erupted when the decision was announced, booing, whistling, throwing programs, stomping
their feet. As the minutes dragged on, the disagreement turned into something more resembling a protest. When Crook stepped up to accept his medal from U.S. ambassador Zellerbach, he looked around in astonishment as the audience kept booing and hissing and cursing while the American flag rose to the rafters and the “Star-Spangled Banner” began playing. “The rotten demonstration went on for seven minutes, according to the clocking,” noted Shirley Povich, “and mostly it was the Italian fans making the foul noises.”

  Pete Newell feared a riot. The Americans in the audience, with that unifying us-against-the-world sensibility of feeling proud, outnumbered, and misunderstood, rose and sang the national anthem with vigor. Povich captured the moment, focusing on the loudest singer. “A visitor in Rome named Bing Crosby who gets big fees singing got up on his feet…and belted out a song for free at the summit of his voice. It was an old number called the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ and this was no time for soft tones, because the American flag was in trouble. It was being booed at the Olympic boxing finals, and Crosby unloaded with a fierce Ethel Merman bust-down-the-roof vigor that could get him thrown out of the crooner’s union. Every other American in the big Palazzo dello Sport was singing, too, because they wanted to make themselves heard in reply to the catcalls and rude bums who didn’t like the U.S. flag there at the top of the Olympic pole.”

  Cassius Clay heard the commotion from his dressing room. He was next up for the Americans, coming out to face another Pole, Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, for the light-heavyweight title. The booing strengthened Clay’s resolve as he made his way to the ring. He knew that he would have to “leave no doubts” in his match.

  Over an eleven-day period there had been 280 bouts with boxers from fifty-four countries, and Nat Fleischer, the veteran editor of Ring magazine, claimed that he had watched them all. The Olympics had featured “above par” sparring, better than at Melbourne, but unacceptably bad officiating, he believed. From his perspective, the bias tilted away from the U.S. and toward the Communist bloc. At least three of the Americans who lost in earlier rounds—Humberto Barrera, Jerry Armstrong, and Quincy Daniels—were eliminated on what Fleischer called “raw decisions.” All, he thought, were victims of the sporting politics of the cold war. Now here came the last America versus Iron Curtain boxing match of the Games—the eighteen-year-old kid from Louisville versus the experienced left-handed Pole. Pietrzykowski had been the European champ three times, took home a bronze medal from Melbourne, and had lost only 13 times in 233 fights going into the match. He was well known to Fleischer, whose journalistic objectivity did not prevent him from giving advice to Clay in the holding room beforehand in the presence of Jules Menendez, the coach, and Ben Becker, the team manager. “Having seen the Pole in action several times, I told [Clay] that if the fight went beyond two rounds, he had to go all out to win.” Clay listened and agreed. “I’ll do that,” he said.

  All on the American side knew that Clay was their best fighter, but his weight class was also the most talented. In an earlier bout, he had struggled against the American-trained Tony Madigan of Australia, who was cool and experienced just like the Pole. The announcer Bud Palmer, covering the fight for CBS, in fact believed that Madigan might have beaten Clay. Pietrzykowski presented the additional problem of being a tall lefty. The most difficult loss of Clay’s young career had been against a tall lefty, Amos Johnson, at the University of Wisconsin Field House at the Pan American trials a year earlier. How would he handle one now?

  The first two rounds were uneventful. Pietrzykowski stayed back, trying to find openings for his long reach. Clay was so quick that he could dodge the Pole’s left even with his gloves down. His footwork was on display, dancing left, skipping right, hands down, then in for a punch. Most of his lefts were landing just short. Both rounds were close. The boxing writers talked about what a showman Clay was but questioned whether he could really take a punch. Neil Allen thought Pietrzykowski won the first “in which there was some neat defensive work by both.” Povich agreed, recording that Clay “was taking a beating from Ziggy.” The judges and most observers thought otherwise and gave the round barely to Clay. In the second round, a furious attack in the last thirty seconds gave that round also to the American, but going into the final round, it was still too close for comfort. Fleischer’s warning registered in Clay’s corner. You have to go out there and get him now. Get him is precisely what Clay did.

  “The whole picture changed in the third and last round,” Allen recorded in his diary. Clay came to life “and began to put his punches together in combination clusters instead of merely whipping out a left jab. He pummeled Pietrzykowski about the ring, blood came from the nose and mouth of the Pole, and only great courage kept this triple European champion on his feet.” Povich, who thought Clay could only “salvage the fight” with a knockout or something close, watched as “all of a sudden Ziggy had a bloody nose, and it seemed that Clay could hit harder than it appeared [a common theme throughout his later career]…and then Ziggy’s whole face was a bloody mask. Clay was throwing punches from angles that were new, and he had the Pole ripe for a knockout, but in his eagerness and greenness he could not put his opponent away.” Still, in the opinion of Ring’s Fleischer, “Clay’s last-round assault on Pietrzykowski was the outstanding hitting of the tournament.” It was, Fleischer said, “an exhibition of perfect hitting by the Kentucky schoolboy.”

  By the time it was over, even the Italians in the arena were on Clay’s side. One of them was Rino Tommasi, a young boxing promoter and writer whose father, Virgilio, the technical director of the Olympics, had been watching the events from his hospital bed since his injury in a traffic accident on the eve of the Opening Ceremony. “It was a great night,” Rino Tommasi said later of the boxing finals—an evening punctuated by the victories of three Italians and the unforgettable performance of the American light heavyweight. Clay was both an attractive boxer and a great actor, Tommasi said, two characteristics equally admired by the Italians. Years later, as a prominent sportswriter in Italy, Tommasi would interview Pietrzykowski, who told him that despite his success in Europe, he knew before entering the ring that Clay would beat him and that he was simply glad he lasted three rounds.

  There were no hisses or whistles when Clay was announced the unanimous winner. Lute Mason, the sports director at the CBS station in San Diego, who was in Rome with a tour group but spent his days helping with the network’s coverage, sat ringside at the fight and was assigned to get Clay up to the broadcast booth for an interview with Bud Palmer. “That was my last amateur fight. I’m turning pro,” Clay said. “But I don’t know exactly how. I want a good contract.” He had intended to keep the USA trunks he wore in Rome as a souvenir, he said, but “now look at them!” They were streaked with the Pole’s blood.

  AS THE LOUD night of boxing drew to an end on the other side of Rome, Rafer Johnson and C. K. Yang were trudging out of Stadio Olimpico. Their competition had resumed after a rain delay of an hour and ten minutes. It was cold and dreary, the stadium lit eerily by floodlights, when the decathletes had returned to the field along with judges and timers wearing rain slickers. Olympic rules said that five events had to be completed each day; postponements were not part of the equation for this all-around contest. But no one said fans had to stay and watch, and few did. The Nelsons were among a band of fewer than a thousand who huddled in the giant stadium to witness the high jump and 400-meter run. Johnson did no better than usual in the high jump, barely clearing 6 feet, and Yang drew closer going into the quarter-mile first-day finale. Johnson always considered the 400 the toughest event in the decathlon. Here it was the end of an exhausting day—more tiring than usual because of the rain—with four events already draining your system, and now you had to run all out for as long as you could. At first Rafer hated the 400, but over the years he had grown to love it, and so did C.K. Late at night, on a soggy track, worn, chilled, and weary, they ran in the same heat. Johnson got off fast, C.K. passed him on the curve and started to
pull away, then Rafer came storming back and nearly caught him at the end. It was another 1005 points for Yang, but a strong 985 for Johnson, who now led by a mere 55 points.

  Would it be enough? At the Trials in Oregon, Johnson remembered, he had led by 200 points at the break and was barely able to hang on. But now he was almost too tired to worry—and too hungry. He slumped in his seat on the shuttle bus back to the village, then headed straight to the cafeteria for his first meal since steak and eggs at breakfast. It was past one in the morning when he reached his bed. The biggest athletic day of his life was but a few short hours away.

  15

  THE LAST LAPS

  EVERYONE seemed up and about early Tuesday morning. Cassius Clay paraded through the village before breakfast, gold medal dangling from his neck. “I got to show this thing off!” he kept boasting. His coach said Clay had slept with the medal, or at least gone to bed with it. The young boxer was too excited to sleep; visions of his future flashed in his mind. He was on his way to signing a professional contract, earning serious money, and becoming even more famous as the heavyweight champion of the world. “Fool, go someplace and sit down,” Lucinda Williams chided him lovingly, like a big sister, when he approached the Tigerbelles and started blabbing on about how he was the greatest. Dallas Long, the bronze medalist shot-putter, said nothing when he came across Clay that morning, but thought to himself: “This guy is such a jerk. He’s never going to amount to anything.”

  Earl Ruby of Louisville’s Courier-Journal visited the village first thing to get material for a column on the hometown hero. Clay told him that he hoped to be home by Friday, but first he had to stop in New York for television and radio interviews. While they were talking, Clay spotted Floyd Patterson, the heavyweight champion of the world, and himself a 1952 Olympic gold medalist, walking through the village. “Good Lord, there’s the champ!” Clay shouted, running toward him. As Ruby later recounted the scene: