Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  On the go from dawn to midnight, Brundage had been everywhere during these Olympics: to the Bay of Naples to watch the yachting; to Lake Albano for the rowing; to the opera, the ballet, and the art museum; to meetings with countesses and princes and presidents; to interviews with the Times of India and Voice of America; to Dutch dinners and Soviet receptions and German dances. Yet he always seemed to be around in early evening at the Stadio Olimpico to drape gold medals around the necks of track-and-field champions. Safe to say he was not besieged by well-wishers as he made his rounds. The Rome Daily American aptly described him as “more or less an international voodoo doll, with critics left and right sticking pins in him.” But, the paper added, “he doesn’t seem to mind.” Now, in front of a relatively friendly audience made up of expatriate businessmen, retired military officers, foreign service personnel, and a sprinkling of spies and writers, Brundage reached into his suit pocket and took out a stack of New York Athletic Club note cards on which he had jotted down the themes for this luncheon address. The opening words on the first note card asked the question “What is this all about?”

  This meant the Olympic Movement, his favorite subject, one he returned to at every opportunity. Brundage repeated his mantra: The Olympics brought together people from all over the world, of every race, religion, color, and political belief—all joined in a demonstration of goodwill. In their modern form, they had survived for sixty-four years with no army, little money, only volunteers and the strength of a powerful idea. In a notation on the side of the note card making this point, he had written in block letters: CONTRAST BOORISH BELLOWING U.N. It was a given to Avery Brundage that his world body was far superior to the other one that was about to meet in New York.

  But the success of the Olympic Movement had brought with it serious problems, Brundage added. The Games had become too large and expensive. He fretted, as his note cards put it, about “excessive nationalism US v USSR, hymns, flags, point scores.” And then there was what he saw as the greatest threat: the erosion of pristine amateurism. “We are in a perpetual battle to keep our games pure and clean and honest,” he said.

  The despoiling of amateurism was Brundage’s longest riff. In his note cards, the irregular stanzas that followed the capitalized AMATEURISM could be read like a free-verse poem from the Brundage chapbook, a hypnotic, romantic longing for his imagined innocence of times past:

  Thing of spirit diff[icult] to define

  Philosophy of life dedicated to task not to reward

  No great working for money

  Painter and musician

  Don’t even know amounts of great cathedrals etc.

  Many acts of religious devotion

  In business Ford & Edison

  Politics Washington Jefferson

  The modern world was seducing and commercializing and corrupting athletes, body and soul, in the United States as much as anywhere, just as surely as lobbyist gifts corrupted the political system:

  Subsidy no good

  College athletic scholarships

  Commercialization

  Pacific Coast conf[erence]

  H.S. boy athlete 50 offers

  We ask mink coats, under table money

  Symptom same disease

  Life too soft, many lazy, don’t like work

  It wasn’t always this way, Brundage said. Our forefathers built up the United States with hard work, intelligence, and skill to create the highest standard of living enjoyed by people anywhere at any point in history. But look where we are now. Even our Olympic team is soft, struggling to hold its own against the world.

  Can’t get something for nothing

  Better get back to fundamentals

  Victims of our own prosperity

  I have seen other countries

  800,000 gymnasts [in USSR]

  We should change entire education process

  Phys ed more about mental above all

  Change thinking teach children self discipline

  Red Smith of the Herald Tribune had slipped into the ballroom and was listening as Brundage talked about America becoming too soft and how there were eight hundred thousand gymnasts in the USSR. Smith could concoct a delicious column out of even the most mundane sporting ingredients, but here was a tasty recipe for him. What a rich contrast he could see between the old man’s lofty ideal and the reality of his existence.

  “Avery Brundage, who always goes first-class, got up on his hind legs in Rome’s luxurious Grand Hotel, fixed the well-fed members of the American Club with a glittering stare, and delivered himself of a stirring panegyric on the Spartan way of life,” Smith wrote. “Fast living, the president of the IOC warned, wagging a manicured finger, was threatening to reduce the United States to a second-class power…Sipping their espresso and gumming their dolce, his listeners heard the words of doom…”

  There was, as it turned out, far more to the contradiction than even Red Smith could discern. Twenty years later, after Brundage’s death, an investigation by Sports Illustrated would uncover his personal duplicity. The man who harrumphed about “teaching children self-discipline” in fact had two children out of wedlock at the time of the Rome Games—two sons born in 1951 and 1952 to his Finnish mistress, Lilian Linnea Dresden. His name was left off the birth certificates, he acknowledged in a private notation, because “showing my name…as the father may cause undue and adverse publicity in view of my present marital status.” At the time, he had been married since 1927 to his wife Elizabeth Dunlap Brundage, with whom he was childless. His affair with the Finnish mistress, who lived in a house he bought for her in Redwood City, California, was only one of hundreds for the upright moralist.

  “SLAVERY AVERY,” some athletes called Brundage. The derisive nickname evoked their hostility toward the IOC’s rules of amateurism, but also reflected a larger disdain for the holier-than-thou attitude of those in power. It came across as a bit too easy for the Chicago millionaire and his upper-crust associates to talk about the virtues of sport for sport’s sake. Their notion of the amateur ideal seemed naive if not miserly, concocted for the lifestyles of the already wealthy. The whole notion of the gentleman amateur was nothing more than a late-nineteenth-century boarding school convention that somehow was imposed on the rest of the athletic world. What, for example, could the Marquess of Exeter know about the daily financial struggle of poor or middle-class athletes who had to train constantly to retain their world-class edge? In a letter to Brundage before the Olympics, the British lord had commiserated with him about how so many athletes were grousing about their restrictions to journalists, who seemed more interested in stories of hardship than the glories of amateurism. “There is an angle which I find depressing, namely that in the old days when people were really hard up and had to make sacrifices for their sport, they had far more idealism than now, when they are three or four times as well off and expect everything to be found for them,” he wrote. “One might have thought that it worked the other way around. This is not confined to sport only.”

  Many athletes had individual stories about what they thought were the unfair or nit-picking intrusions of the Olympic hierarchy. We have already seen how Lee Calhoun endured a one-year suspension for getting married on Bride and Groom, and how Dave Sime had to find his way back from Pierre, South Dakota, after being told he couldn’t play semipro baseball, and how Rafer Johnson was warned that a role in Spartacus would doom his gold medal hopes. And there were many more: Bob Mathias, who had been contemplating a comeback attempt as a decathlete earlier in the year, had been told that he was definitely ineligible because “his television and movie contracts depended upon his athletic reputation.” Abie and Muriel Grossfeld, the young married couple of U.S. gymnastics, were threatened with being “turned in” to the U.S. Olympic Committee for working during the summers at a gymnastics camp near Traverse City, Michigan, run by their coach at the University of Illinois, where they earned “something like thirty bucks a week.” Pat Smythe, a British equestrian, was told by
the IOC that she could not participate in Rome if she worked as a part-time journalist for the Daily Express.

  For all of these known cases, far more was going on below the surface. Some of the as-yet undetected situations were serious breaches of the amateur code. There was Armin Hary’s financial connection to German shoe companies, for example, and the common practice in Sweden of promoters paying track stars to appear at meets there. Most were of a pettier nature, part of the grist of the sporting life. Nikos Spanakos, the U.S. boxer, who grew up poor in Brooklyn before boxing collegiately in Idaho, said later that financial boosters were an implicit factor in the amateur boxing world. “We called them sugar daddies in those days,” Spanakos recalled, saying the boosters could come as often from a local Elks Club as from a gambling parlor. “It was under the table. Everything under the table. Sometimes after a fight, an amateur fight, you got a watch or fifteen or twenty dollars.” The American weight lifters, who worked out at the York Barbell Company gym in York, Pennsylvania, were taken care of by the company owner, Bob Hoffman, who was also their coach. They received free housing and food and a weekly stipend ostensibly for working in his factory. “We could go to any restaurant in town, and he’d pick up the tab,” said Ike Berger, the featherweight lifter. James Bradford, the heavyweight, when asked about the subsidies, responded, “Right. But it had to be done very, very quietly.” He made a hand gesture of money being passed under a table.

  Brundage and his men could not prove it, but they suspected something fishy was going on with some Italian athletes in 1960. The IOC chancellor, Otto Mayer, went public with the accusation that Italy had persuaded its best soccer players and boxers to postpone going professional until after the Olympics so they could help the home country have a stronger showing in Rome. The implication—and fear—was that they were already being paid, but on a deferred basis. This touched on the huge political side to the amateur issue that divided East from West. How could state-subsidized athletes from the socialist nations be called amateurs? Brundage had been facing that question since his visit to the Soviet Union in 1954, but to some in the West he seemed less than vigilant in enforcing the amateur code on Eastern bloc delegations. Don Graham, the Washington Post copyboy, remembered listening to long lectures in Rome from big-city daily track-and-field writers “on how our guys were amateurs and the Soviets were all products of the sports machine.”

  It was a common perception among journalists in Rome that Brundage’s fight on the amateur issue was at once draconian and illogical. “Brundage had a misguided notion of athletics and amateurism,” said Rino Tommasi, the Italian sportswriter. “You can’t do a sport well if you don’t do only that. He was old-fashioned—and in a way too tough. There is an old saying that the only difference between an amateur and a pro is that a pro pays taxes.” Hours after the Opening Ceremony, when a group of reporters retreated to a hotel bar, a colleague turned to Neil Allen and scoffed as he recalled the moment when Adolfo Consolini, the Italian discus thrower, had emerged from the throng of athletes gathered on the Stadio Olimpico infield to recite the oath of amateurism. “It’s all pretty hypocritical, isn’t it? That chappie getting up there and swearing away to be good amateurs. Lot of rot, really.”

  Brundage’s view of amateurism could not be separated from his utter contempt for professional sports and their feeder programs, especially in football. In the early 1950s, he wrote a memo to himself declaring that it was a mistake even to put pro and sports in the same phrase. Eighty percent of newspaper sports sections, he lamented, was “devoted to professional baseball, football, boxing, horseracing, etc., WHICH ARE NOT SPORT AT ALL. It is a question of nomenclature. Professional sport is a branch…of the entertainment business.” College football, he believed, was not far behind—“so thoroughly commercialized that it can hardly be called a sport. There is no reason why our institutions of higher learning should be football factories and farms for professional leagues.” College football had become “a national scandal” whose abuses were “poisoning our entire amateur program.” He saw in football the creeping professionalism that he so desperately wanted to keep out of the Olympics.

  But could he ever win his “perpetual battle to keep our games pure and clean and honest?” The IOC had been engaged in that battle since at least 1937, when it adopted a report on amateurism at its session in Warsaw that prohibited athletes from receiving gifts for competing or taking jobs that capitalized on their notoriety, and declared that a professional in one sport would be considered a professional in all sports. Olympic Rule 26 defined an amateur like this: “An amateur is one who participates and always has participated in sport solely for pleasure and for the physical, mental, or social benefits he derives therefrom, and to whom participation in sport is nothing more than recreation without material gain of any kind, direct or indirect.”

  But maintaining strict amateur standards over the years seemed more and more a losing cause. An essay in Sports Illustrated on the eve of the Olympics declared that Rome “will see the last amateur Olympics.” Led by delegate Albert Mayer of Switzerland, some Olympic officials had concluded by 1960 that the line between amateurism and professionalism was so jagged they should draw the line somewhere else. They shared the practical opinion of Gaston Meyer, chief editor of France’s influential L’Équipe, who had concluded a series of articles on amateurism with the line “Do not forbid what you cannot prevent.” Albert Mayer proposed a novel solution: ignore what it means to be an amateur and instead only define professionalism. To deal with “a public and world scandal,” Emile Birnbaum noted in L’Echo Illustré of Geneva, Mayer had “the courage to say publicly what everyone thinks privately, and to want to open the wound. He says we must accept at the games not only amateur athletes but also athletes who are not amateurs, who receive bonuses and draw a profit from their athletic activities. According to him, the only ones that should be excluded are the true professionals, those who live predominantly off their sports earnings…The line will no longer be drawn between amateurs and nonamateurs, but between nonprofessionals and professionals. It will no longer be the profit that will exclude, but the fact that the profit is the principal income.”

  Brundage had managed to quash that idea, for the time being, when it was brought up at the IOC meeting at the Excelsior Hotel on the eve of the Olympics. His alternative was to propose holding a competition “for the purpose of awarding a prize for the best article published in the press in defense of a better understanding of amateurism.” As he later told the luncheon gathering of the American Club of Rome, according to his note cards:

  The other day a journalist said why bother—you fight A losing battle…everyone wants to make money—No more amateurs but fortunately there are still a few idealists.

  For the athletes from Germany’s Eastern zone, Thursday had begun in mourning as news spread through the village of the death of their president, eighty-four-year-old Wilhelm Pieck, who had seen them off to Rome only a few weeks earlier. Pieck was a former carpenter who had fled Germany with the rise of Hitler and oversaw a resistance movement from Moscow during the war. There he became close to Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. In 1949 he returned to his homeland to become the first president of the Soviet Zone’s fledgling satellite regime, the German Democratic Republic. In the socialist system, his title had been largely honorific; the real power rested with Communist Party boss Walter Ulbricht, but Pieck was a symbolic father figure in the East, a connection to the anti-Nazi past. “Everyone could see our athletes standing around talking, being strongly moved,” reported the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland. “And when the news had spread in the village, many of the Soviet athletes came to express their condolences, along with the Hungarians, the Poles, the Czechs, Romanians, and Bulgarians.”

  At the final day of track-and-field events at Stadio Olimpico, the Eastern zone athletes arrived wearing black ribbons in honor of Pieck. They also performed surprisingly well, with Hans Grodotszi of Menterode finishing second in the 10,
000-meter run and Walter Kreuger of Hohendorf taking second place in the javelin. With those two silver medals, and the Olympics nearing an end, journalists from the Eastern zone dropped all pretenses of considering this a unified German team. There had been one modest but important political separation all along. In its daily scoreboard, Neues Deutschland had denoted an athlete from the East with the designation GDR, the initials of the government entity, but identified an athlete from the West as WD, meaning West Germany, rather than by the parallel government designation, BRD, the initials for the Federal Republic of Germany, or Bundesrepublik Deutschland. This was a not-so-subtle way of trumpeting the legitimacy of the Eastern zone government, which was still unrecognized by most countries in the West. Now, in the final days in Rome, the socialist newspaper even started counting medals separately from the West and boasted of how athletes from the GDR could “pride themselves in having conquered sixth rank of all the participating countries.” It was left unsaid that by those standards, the West German athletes had accumulated even more medals.

  But journalists from West Germany had also fallen into a less accommodating mood. A columnist from Die Welt, echoing the ideology-tinged explanations that more often emanated from East Berlin, now gave a political reason for the disappointing showings of three Eastern zone athletes: Siegfried Valentin in the metric mile, Manfred Matuschewski in the 800, and Hermann Buhl in the steeplechase. “They failed when it really mattered. They lagged far behind their personal records and at the same time nearly collapsed when they crossed the finish line,” the columnist wrote. “A mediocre performance resulted in complete exhaustion. It was not physical but mental and psychic exhaustion. They were not independent but were indebted to their state, their functionaries, and their own promise to give everything in their power to the praise and fame of their state. Rome has demonstrated that an athlete exposed to this kind of burden will rarely manage to achieve top results which lead to Olympic medals.” The temptation to link sports success to ideology was always a slippery slope: How then to explain the overall success of the Soviet team, and the unburdened victories of Poland’s Jozef Schmidt in the hop, step, and jump, and Zdzislaw Krzyszkowiak in the steeplechase?