Rome 1960

by David Maraniss

  The friction within the German community in Rome reflected the growing tensions playing out back home. The five-day ban on West Germans trying to enter East Berlin had been lifted (1,061 Westerners had been sent back from the border during that period, according to the Interior Ministry in Bonn), but now the Soviet zone government was attempting to permanently tighten the border. Starting midnight Friday, special permission would be required for any West German seeking entry into East Berlin. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described this as a hostile act and predicted that it was “the first step of a conversion of the sector border into the national border of the GDR.” It was also seen as part of a broader strategic effort by the Soviets and East Germans to press the Western powers on the status of Berlin in the run-up to Khrushchev’s visit to the United Nations. A communiqué from the Soviet zone news agency said the new policy was nothing more than a precaution against “Western provocations.”

  The German hordes in Rome had returned to the Stadio Olimpico one last time Thursday afternoon to chant in unison for the men’s and women’s relay teams. In all three of the final races, the Germans were considered strong medal contenders, going head-to-head with the Americans.

  First up was the men’s 4 x 400. A light rain had dampened the track by four-thirty, when the six teams took their positions, the Germans in Lane 2, the Americans in Lane 4. American Jack Yerman seized an early lead in the first leg, then young German star Manfred Kinder blitzed back in the second, so that only a tenth of a second separated the two teams. The stadium was in full roar by the time Glenn Davis, the all-round U.S. star who had already won gold in the 400 hurdles, took the baton on the third leg. He picked up two crucial yards on the exchange, pounded steadily down the track, and when Johannes Kaiser tried to pull even with him as they rounded the curve toward the backstretch, the American found another gear. “I took it easy so he would use up his strength catching me on the backstretch,” Davis recalled. “When he came up, I carried him wide. Then when he relaxed, I kicked and opened up the lead I wanted.”

  He was four yards in front when he handed the baton to the anchor, his fellow gold medalist, Otis Davis. Now came a rematch of the exhilarating 400 final, with the American again trying to hold off Carl Kaufmann. Davis, the former basketball player, was still considered a novice in the running world, but he was at his peak in Rome, and his tactical skills were now catching up to his raw talent. He knew that Kaufmann had a terrific closing burst and gauged his own race accordingly. “I just learned how to run in the last couple of races,” he told Track & Field News’s Cord Nelson later. “I accelerated a little to make Kaufmann use his strength to catch me, then I floated. When he came up again, I’d accelerate, then float again. I figured he’d use up his power trying to catch me each time, then I’d turn on the kick and walk away.” This was, in its own way, a variation on the tactic that Karl Adam had devised successfully for his German heavyweight crew on Lake Albano. Kaufmann could not close the gap, and this time there was no need to wait fifteen minutes to determine the photo finish. In bringing the Americans to the tape in an Olympic and world record time of 3:02.2, a full five-tenths of a second ahead of the Germans, Glenn Davis and Otis Davis had both secured their second gold medals in Rome. Tex Maule went so far as to call it “the most intelligently run, aesthetically satisfying race of the Olympics.”

  AT SIX that morning, back in Nashville, Charlie B. Temple was getting her day under way. After feeding her two young children, she took four-year-old Edwina to a babysitter and seven-year-old Bernard to school, then drove over to Tennessee State and began her routine at the school’s post office. She knew that this was the last big day in Rome for her husband and his Tigerbelles, who would take the track in a few hours, given the time difference. Martha Hudson, Barbara Jones, Lucinda Williams, and Wilma Rudolph were her girls too. Her presence in their lives might go unnoticed to the rest of the world, but Mother Temple was as important to them as Coach Temple. She fed them, baked cakes for their birthdays, and listened to their problems when they felt uncomfortable talking about certain subjects with the coach. When they did something crazy to upset him, she was the one to make peace. When they weren’t practicing, they often came into her cramped office and helped her sort the mail. Tennessee State might turn out the best runners around, but it was no track factory, just a tight little family.

  The family dynamics had changed considerably since the Tigerbelles reached Rome. The runners still thought of one another as sisters, but Wilma Rudolph’s transcendent performances in the 100 and 200 had made her alone world famous. She was the star, mobbed everywhere, while the others hovered in the background. Unavoidably, given human nature, there was a tinge of envy among some of her teammates. “There was possibly some jealousy from one or two of our members—a feeling that she was getting all the accolades and all the attention,” recalled Lucinda Williams. “But it’s a team effort, and sometimes that’s hard for individuals to understand. I always accepted Wilma for her worth and dignity, not only in running but in her personality and her caring.” Rudolph was sensitive enough to appreciate the situation and saw only one remedy: get them all gold.

  “The race that I think she wanted more than anything else was the four by hundred,” Ed Temple remembered. “She had two medals, but the other girls were down because they didn’t get to the finals in the hundred and two hundred and didn’t win any medals, and this was the only chance they were going to get, and she was determined that they were going to win a gold medal.” In the warm-up room before the race, the Tigerbelles huddled and prayed together. “Just get me that stick,” Rudolph, who would run the anchor leg, said at the end. “Just get me that stick, and we’re going to get on that stand. We’re going to win that gold medal!” Her teammates could barely contain themselves; no jealousy now, just fire burning inside. They’d get her the stick, they said. They’d beat the Germans, and the Russians, and the Brits.

  Martha Hudson ran the first leg. She was the shrimp of the Tigerbelles, a five-foot-one dynamo from McRae, Georgia, who had caught Coach Temple’s eye in high school when she beat some Tigerbelles at the Tuskegee Relays, and arrived at Tennessee State in 1957. Hudson, who worked as a dormitory receptionist when she wasn’t training or studying, was always competitive but rarely won in major competitions. She had finished fourth in the 60-meter dash at the 1959 Pan American Games in Chicago, then qualified for the 100 in Rome but failed to reach the semifinal round, her time more than a second slower than Rudolph’s. With her quick start, she kept the Tigerbelles competitive now, her short legs carrying her down the track in the lead pack with the runners from Germany and Great Britain. As she handed the baton off—and up—to the five-seven-and-a-half Barbara Jones, Hudson joked later, she thought to herself, “I doubt if ever before so much depended on so little.”

  Jones was the most experienced Tigerbelle. She had first competed in the Olympics at age fifteen at Helsinki in 1952, began her college career at Marquette University in Milwaukee, then transferred to Tennessee State, arriving in time to lead the women’s team at the dual meet in Moscow in 1958. She had been slowed by a lingering thigh injury most of the year and was heartbroken to finish fourth in the 100-meter semifinals in Rome, where she had hoped to join Rudolph on the medal stand. Now she faced a world-class field in the second leg, going against Maria Itkina of the Soviet Union and Dorothy Hyman of Great Britain, both of whom had made the 100 final ahead of her. This time no one could outrun her, and she handed the baton off to Lucinda Williams with the Tigerbelles barely in second place.

  Coach Temple, watching from the warm-up area, could not see the first two legs, but he caught sight of his team just as the stick moved from Jones to Williams. When he saw Williams so close to the lead, he felt good about their chances, knowing that she could “run the curve” as well as anyone. The Savannah native was the other twenty-three-year-old veteran in the group, one of the bronze medalists on the relay team at Melbourne and a winner in the 200 at the dual meet in
Moscow. Married and already a graduate of Tennessee State by 1960, Williams had stayed in Nashville and continued to run with the Tigerbelles while studying for a master’s in physical education. In Rome she competed in the 200 but finished a disappointing fifth in her semifinal heat. This was her last chance, her last race, and she had something to prove. She had never felt the adrenaline going through her so fast. She blazed around the curve even with the Germans and reached out to hand the baton to Rudolph.

  Fred Russell, the hometown Nashville columnist, was watching in the press section. “One of the least appreciated moments is the passing of the baton in an Olympic sprint relay,” he noted. “One runner, finishing at full speed, tries to hand the stick to another who’s starting as fast as she can within the prescribed zone of twenty-two yards.” Except now, Rudolph had started and then stopped. It seemed almost as though the speed with which Williams came at her took her by surprise. She stuck back her hand, but the rhythm was off. “Get me the stick,” she had said. But where was it? For years thereafter, Williams would be blamed for the slight bobble that left Rudolph standing there empty-handed for a split second until the transfer was secured. But it was not her fault. Williams just came in too fast, and Rudolph was at first too jumpy and then a trifle slow. Rather than risk dropping the baton or running beyond the handoff zone and being disqualified, Wilma stopped to make sure the baton was in her hand. “When she missed the first time, I said, ‘Oh my goodness,’” Temple said later. “But when it got in there the second time, let me tell you something…” The handoff delay had cost Rudolph two or three yards on the opposition. And she had every reason to be tired; this was her tenth race, counting qualifying heats, of the Games, as many as any athlete had run.

  But Williams and her teammates were not the least concerned. “We knew that once she got that baton, it didn’t matter who was ahead. She was going to catch them, and she did.” Coach Temple moved closer to watch the final dash. “When she got the stick, in seventy-five yards she caught the whole pack, and from then on it was a matter of by how far she was going to win,” he recalled. “She won the thing by five yards going away. I never seen nobody…” His voice trailed off before picking up again. “I wish I had a stopwatch on her those first seventy-five yards. I mean she moved. She had a mission to accomplish, and she did it. When she crossed that tape, and the other three ran and grabbed her and they had a dance on the track, they were so happy.”

  The foreign press corps, which had fallen for Wilma just as so many of the male athletes had, swooned at the sight of her breezing across the line, far ahead for a third time. “La Gazelle, naturellement,” a French photographer was heard to shout, when someone asked who won. “La Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Clarksville, actually, but close enough. The scene even brightened the outlook of the grumpy male chauvinist A. J. Liebling: “All these runners were colored, and Wilma Rudolph, our last runner, made the women in the other lanes look like members of a third athletic sex—perhaps junior misses. She runs the hundred in time that would have won dual meets between men’s university teams when I went to college. I am on principle opposed to the serious consideration of women’s track events in Olympic Games, but if they are to be taken seriously, American women may as well win them…In any case, Miss Rudolph is a joy to behold, even when standing still.”

  In watching Rudolph, Tex Maule remarked that her graceful, straight-up stride reminded him of the way Dave Sime ran. Now here came Sime and his teammates on the men’s 4 x 100 relay team, preparing for a final showdown with the Germans in the last race on the Stadio Olimpico track. It was just past six o’clock. Dusk filtered the fall sky. The light rain had stopped. Sime gathered with his talented squad: Frank Budd, Stone Johnson, and Ray Norton, who entered the stadium with the burden of a goat, perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Olympics, a would-be champion who had finished dead last in both the 100 and 200. While Dave Sime went to Naples and back and worked on his mission with Igor Ter-Ovanesyan in recent days, Norton kept running, trying to work his way out of a slump that he believed had been caused by injury, not by choking under pressure. Was he ready? The coaches, uncertain, switched the lineup, placing Norton second and giving the anchor leg to Sime.

  Nearby were the Germans: Bernd Cullmann, Walter Mahlendorf, Martin Lauer, and Armin Hary, the imperturbable antagonist who now, with his victory in the 100, strode the track as “the fastest man in the world.” Also, it seemed, the haughtiest. If this was the dawn of a new sporting age, when a sense of entitlement came with being an athletic star, Hary was leading the way. Some viewed him as a misunderstood iconoclast who hated bourgeois convention; others just considered him rude and self-centered. “Since he has become an Olympic champion, Armin Hary has been acting like Maria Callas,” wrote a columnist for the French Le Miroir des Sports, comparing him to the opera diva. “He puts on airs, strikes an attitude, poses for effect, and treats his court seriously. With the journalists, he is casual and evasive, not hiding the fact that he takes pleasure in being begged, and showing by his whole attitude that henceforth, Mr. Armin Hary has specific times for holding court…that, moreover, he only respects that which seems good to him. The new god of the stadium is anxious to accomplish feats beyond the world of sports. ‘He is not bad,’ the Germans say. ‘He is just pigheaded and volatile. He has a bad personality. But it is better to have a bad personality than no personality.’”

  Hary, pigheaded or not, had made one decision already that had pleased his coaches and teammates. Unlike Norton, he had decided to forgo the 200-meter dash, for which he had also qualified, in order to save his energy for the relay. The Frankfurt newspaper called it “a good decision,” noting that the centrifugal force of the curve on the 200 could be physically wearing for “fragile, sensitive runners” like Hary, and that running the relay without him “would be meaningless” for the Germans. For the final, they put Hary in the second spot, running against Norton, while Sime in the anchor leg would face Lauer. The Germans ran from the fifth lane, near the outside, while the Americans had the inside lane, their starting blocks lined up around what the old railbird Red Smith called “the clubhouse turn.”

  What happened in this relay? From the stands, as on the track, it was all in the perspective. “What a race!” began the account in the Allgemeine Zeitung. “This was a race which surpassed everything else which the spectators cheered about previously. Whoever saw Hary in this race…will not have the slightest doubt anymore about his world record as a sprinter.” With their fans chanting effusively in unison, the German journalists watched as “Cullmann stamped energetically through the curve, and the exchange with Hary was performed just like out of a sprinter’s textbook. The man from Frankfurt stormed full of energy along the straightaway, leaving no chance to any of his adversaries. Again the stick exchange worked perfectly, and Mahlendorf boomed along the curve. In the inner part, though, Johnson [Stone Johnson of the U.S.] gained some ground. The exchange then between Mahlendorf and Lauer was also performed wonderfully, and then the man from Cologne and Dave Sime stormed side by side over the homestretch. Sime was, there is no doubt about that, slightly ahead. But…”

  And quite a but it was, but first consider the beginning of that last sentence. Even this boosterish account of German glory had to point out that Sime was slightly ahead. That meant he crossed the finish line first. His anchor leg was one of the greatest 100s he had ever run. When he took the baton, he was three strides behind Lauer. The stadium crowd was on its feet, in full roar, watching as Sime blazed down the track with his ferocious upright style and beat the Germans. He was thinking about nothing else but getting to the tape. He had made it. He had been perhaps the greatest sprinter never to win gold, denied his chance in Melbourne by an injury, barely nosed out by Hary in the 100 a week earlier. Now the big redhead crossed the finish line first, but—turned around, looked back, and saw that something was amiss. The Italian judges were standing at the spot where Frank Budd handed off to Ray Norton, and were waving a bright flag.<
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  Ray Norton had worried all week about the timing of the second leg. As an anchor runner, he had been accustomed to taking the handoff from Stone Johnson, but now he had to adjust to Frank Budd. Watching from the stands, Bud Winter, Johnson’s coach, could see trouble as Budd approached the transfer point. “Frank tightened up a bit and slowed coming into the exchange. I knew it because I could see his head go back. That was enough to throw Ray off,” Winter reported later. This was the wrong moment to slow up approaching Norton, who was too anxious, running too fast. Norton said he felt stronger than he had in months. “When Budd hit the mark, I took off, and I just absolutely flew, and he couldn’t catch me.” As Budd realized that Norton was nearing the end of the 22-foot zone, he yelled for his teammate to stop. Norton slowed almost to a complete stop to take the blind handoff. Pincus Sober, the manager of the U.S. track team, had a perfect view of the handoff and realized immediately that “Norton definitely went out of his zone.” The judges realized it as well.

  Aside from Budd, who was in the vicinity of the judges, his work done, the American runners seemed the last to know. They were focused entirely on the race ahead, intent on defeating the Germans. Sime hit the tape in record time, 39.4 seconds, a tenth of a second ahead of Lauer. But he would say later that he never felt so bad in his life as the moment when he looked back, saw the commotion of the Italian judges halfway around the track, and realized what had happened behind him. So much work for nothing. He was inconsolable, “more angry than disappointed,” and after letting off a little steam with Norton, he walked off by himself, wanting only to be alone, and far away. Norton was equally devastated. When he lost the 200, he threw his shoes against a wall. Now he never wanted to wear them again. “It was like a total nightmare for me. I had worked so hard…but it just wasn’t for me.”