1967
BENCH FROM THE ICE BOWL
It introduced the phrase “the frozen tundra” to the football lexicon. It provided the coda to what may be the best football book ever written, Instant Replay. It was the end of the Green Bay Packers dynasty. The game forever known as the Ice Bowl, played on December 31, 1967, was terrific sport. What made it the stuff of legend were the conditions. At game time, the temperature was minus 13 degrees; with the wind chill, it felt like minus 48.1
It also featured two of the greatest coaches in National Football League history, Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys and Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers. From their days on the New York Giants in the 1950s, when Landry ran the defense and Lombardi the offense, the two had mixed respect and rivalry. Landry was a quiet stoic from Texas. Lombardi was a passionate loudmouth from Brooklyn. In other ways, their characters were similar: they were both religious, intense, and driven.
Lombardi was the first to leave New York, taking over the browbeaten Packers in 1959; the team hadn’t had a winning season in 11 years. From then through 1967, he led it to a record of 89 wins, 29 losses, and four ties,2 winning six conference titles and five championships, including the first two Super Bowls.
Landry took over the expansion Cowboys in 1960 and didn’t have a good team until 1966, when the team lost a heartbreaker to the Packers in the conference championship, 34–27. But the Packers were beginning to age, while the Cowboys were a team on the rise. Going into this game, Lombardi had ulcers; Landry had the sense his time had come.
Neither man had anticipated the arctic front that drove temperatures down 30 degrees overnight. It was so cold that the electric coils beneath Lambeau Field, installed to keep the field playable, also froze. The teams played on a rock-hard field, with a layer of ice on top. The officials could not use their whistles because they stuck to their lips. Several players got frostbite, and one fan died of exposure. Before the game, announcer Frank Gifford set the tone with the comment, “I think I’ll take another bite of my coffee.”3
One end of this bench, used by the Packers, was popular because it was adjacent to the warmer—which then ran out of fuel.4 There was no respite.
The Packers forged a 14–0 lead early in the second quarter, but the Cowboys turned two turnovers into 10 points and trailed at the half only 14–10, a score that held up into the fourth quarter. Then, showing some razzle-dazzle, the Cowboys ran an option play in which running back Dan Reeves, who had taken a handoff, found wide receiver Lance Rentzel for a 50-yard touchdown. With 4:50 left, Dallas was ahead for the first time, 17–14.
Starting from their own 32, the Packers began The Drive. “This is it,” quarterback Bart Starr told his teammates. “We’re going in.”5 Mixing short passes and runs, the Pack marched down the field with relentless efficiency. All 11 men knew exactly what they needed to do and did it. Lombardi emphasized fundamentals and execution; The Drive exemplified both. With less than a minute left, if was first and goal from the one. Twice, the Packers tried to run it in. Twice, the Cowboys held.
With 16 seconds left, Starr took the final timeout. The percentage play was to try a pass; if it fell incomplete, there would be time to kick a field goal to tie. But the pass protection had been poor all day. Starr’s idea was to lunge into the end zone between the center and the guard.6 “Let’s run it,” Lombardi agreed, “and get the hell out of here.”7 In the huddle, Starr called “31 wedge and I’ll carry the ball.”8 The key was for right guard Jerry Kramer to push Jethro Pugh out of the way. He did, hitting him low, while center Ken Bowman pushed Pugh back. Starr slipped through, and the Packers won, 21–17.
In the winners’ locker room, Kramer said of Lombardi, “This is one beautiful man.”9 Kramer did not love Lombardi all the time, something that comes across in his book, Instant Replay. But he realized that it was Lombardi who had instilled in the Packers the will, and the capabilities, to compete the way they had.
In the losers’ locker room, Cowboys’ quarterback Don Meredith expressed pride in his teammates and mused that in a sense there was no loser in the game, because all involved had displayed such courage. His eloquence was impressive and played a role in ABC calling him a couple of years later to join a new show, Monday Night Football (see the 1970 entry on MNF). There he would be Dandy Don, class clown; on December 31, 1967, he was Don Meredith, Cowboy poet.
The Packers would beat the Raiders in the Super Bowl and become the first (and still only) team to win three championships in a row.10 Landry’s time would indeed come; he would win two Super Bowls with the Cowboys in the 1970s.
1968
STATUE OF TOMMIE SMITH AND JOHN CARLOS
I
n November 2005 San Jose State University unveiled this 22-foot-high statue featuring two of its former students, Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The statue, and the photo on which it is based, not only freeze a moment in time but wordlessly crystallize the complicated problems that exist at the intersection of race, sports, and society. Those problems have not been resolved; only the details have changed. That is why the moment has retained its power. The photo has become one of the most iconic moments of Olympic history, indeed of twentieth-century American history.
In broad terms, this silent gesture was the end result of a lifetime of racial insult. More narrowly, it was the culmination of about a year of activism among a wide range of black American male athletes.
In late 1967 San Jose State professor Harry Edwards founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR).1 The group had some local successes, forcing a number of universities to take black grievances seriously and disrupting what would have been the New York Athletic Club’s 100th-anniversary celebrations, when many of the best black athletes (and a good many white ones) refused to compete at the all-white, all-Christian club. But the OPHR’s Olympic goals—the resignation of leader Avery Brundage and the banning of South Africa and Rhodesia, in particular—seemed destined to fail. In February 1968, after a five-year absence, South Africa was readmitted to the Games. That decision reinforced the idea that black Americans should boycott the Mexico City Olympics in October,2 not only in protest against apartheid South Africa, but also against racial inequities at home.
The idea was controversial, not only among Brundage and the Olympic establishment, but also among the black athletes themselves. When South Africa was banned again in April, much of the momentum went out of the boycott movement.3 Most of the male African American athletes surveyed wanted to compete.4 Interestingly, black women were not even asked for their opinion; Wyomia Tyus (see the 1952 entry on the Tigerbelles) was more than a little ticked, saying later that she was “appalled . . . that the men simply took us for granted,” assuming that the women would do “whatever we were told.”5 The point became moot. In the end, even the leaders of OPHR, such as John Carlos, Lee Evans, and Tommie Smith, went to Mexico City to compete.
But while the boycott had imploded, the idea of using the Olympics as a platform had not. Carlos and Smith decided that after the 200-meter race—they were confident that they would both medal—they would make the podium “a festival of visual symbols to express our feelings.”6 When the race started, Carlos took the lead, but near the bend, Smith turned on what had become known as the “Tommie jets” and surged past him. Australian Peter Norman nipped Carlos with a few meters left to take second. Smith set a world record 19.83 seconds that lasted for more than a decade.
Exhilarated and relieved, the two men changed into their warm-up suits, then prepared themselves. They each put on one black glove and took off their shoes; Smith wore a scarf and Carlos some beads. Norman, in solidarity with the two sprinters, whom he had come to like and respect, wore an OPHR button.7 The three stepped up to their respective places, and when the “Star Spangled Banner” began to play, Smith, an army reserve officer, straightened his back and raised his black-gloved right arm straight up while he bent his head.8 Carlos, in a more relaxed pose, raised his left arm. In stillness, they listened to the anthem of a nation to which they were profoundly connected but from which they were also deeply detached.9 The crowd, too, was still, or in Carlos’s memorable phrase, “you honestly could have heard a frog piss on cotton.” Then came the boos, as well as a scattering of cheers. The two were hustled out of the stadium.
Shortly afterward Smith explained the symbolism of their act. His raised right hand was for the power of black America; Carlos’s left was for the unity of black America. The black scarf was for black pride; the black beads represented the history of lynching10 and the black socks and no shoes the prevalence of poverty. “The totality of our effort,” Smith concluded, “was the regaining of black dignity.”11
Avery Brundage did not see it that way. One of the most consequential Olympic figures of the twentieth century, he is also the most controversial. On almost any subject of substance, he could be relied on to do the wrong thing, in the wrong way. This was one of those times.
The members of the US Olympic Committee (USOC), while not happy with the protest, were inclined to do nothing about it.12 As far as they were concerned, it was over. Brundage and the International Olympic Committee, however, were enraged. The protest violated the “universally accepted principle,” the IOC stated, that politics “play no part whatsoever” in the Olympics.13
Perhaps this is the place to spike the idea that politics and sports don’t mix. They do, and in the case of the Olympics, they always have. Greece agreed to host the first modern games in 1896, for example, in part to bolster the standing of its not-very-robust monarchy.14 The IOC dealt only with national committees, the Games began with the parade of nations, athletes performed as members of national teams, and victors heard their national anthems.15 Somehow, none of that counted as political.
The USOC was ordered to expel the two from the Olympic Village and the American team,16 or the whole US track team would be kicked out.17 The US officials complied and also offered an apology. For Carlos and Smith, the sanctions were meaningless; they were already moving out of the Village, and they had no more events.18 They were not stripped of their medals. The ban from international competition hurt, however. Smith’s athletic career ended on that podium. As New York Times sports columnist Red Smith (no relation) would later note, the IOC’s heavy-handed reaction turned a simple gesture that might have been forgotten into an international incident.19
Carlos and Smith were not the only ones to bring protest politics to the podium in 1968. There was also Vera Čáslavská. The great Czech gymnast had been an outspoken advocate of the Prague Spring, the effort to diminish Soviet influence and liberalize the country. After the Soviet invasion in 1968, she fled to the mountains, where she trained by lifting sacks of potatoes and swinging from trees.20 At the last minute, she was allowed to go to Mexico City, where she won six medals, including a tie for gold in the floor exercise with a Soviet athlete. When the Soviet anthem played, Čáslavská turned her head down and away, a subtle, sad Cold War Pietà.21 The IOC imposed no punishment for her unmistakable gesture. Perhaps it knew it wouldn’t have to. On her return to Czechoslovakia, Čáslavská was essentially banned from sports and public life for the next 17 years.22 Nor did anyone in the Olympic movement see fit to protest the treatment of Emil Zátopek, a triple gold winner in the 1952 Olympics. Also a supporter of the Prague Spring, Zátopek was expelled from the Communist Party; fired from his job; stripped of his military rank; and required to work as a garbage collector, street sweeper, and miner.23
And that was not even the worst of it for poor Czechoslovakia when it came to the dangerous intersection of sports and politics. That low moment came in March 1950, when the secret police convicted all but one member of the country’s ice hockey team24 on charges including treason, espionage, and slander. Their real crime was that the authorities thought some of them were considering defection. After months of brutal treatment,25 the players were sentenced to terms ranging from 1 to 15 years in prison. Most were amnestied in 1955, having spent years as forced laborers, some of them down uranium mines. The IOC had nothing to say about this, either, though many of the players had competed on the 1948 silver-medal Olympic team.
These are examples of individuals and governments taking action, but in terms of things over which the IOC has sole authority, politics are still ubiquitous. In 1908, for example, Finland was allowed to have its own team, but not to show its flag. Serbia, which was then part of the Austria-Hungary empire, had its own two-man team in 1912, a privilege accorded to none of the other bits and pieces that made up that empire. The decision not to invite Germany and its World War I allies (Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey) to the 1920 Games in Antwerp was clearly political; nor was Germany welcome in 1924, 1948, or 1952. The winner of the 1936 marathon, Sohn Kee-chung, ran under the Japanese flag and under a Japanese name, Son Kitei. Sohn was, in fact, Korean, which was an unhappy colony of Japan and not allowed to compete in its own right.26 After the war the highly political question of how many Germanies to allow, and under what flag and banner, was not settled until 1972. And that was comparatively simple compared to the endless wrangling over what to call Taiwan, once the People’s Republic of China decided to reenter the Olympic arena at the 1980 Winter Olympics.27 Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but not when it comes to the Olympics; they compete independently. In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was still a Yugoslavia, but also a Slovenia and Croatia, which had not yet been recognized by the United Nations at that point.
In this context, then, the outrage directed at Tommy Smith and John Carlos appears both ridiculous and hypocritical. Sending an Olympic team down the uranium mines is met with indifferent silence, but when two black Americans make a peaceful, purposeful, and dignified gesture, the outrage is instant.
Sometimes, though, the arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, or at least vindication. Over the last couple of decades, Carlos and Smith have put their critics behind them. Rather than the misspelled and frightening death threats they endured for years, now their mail is more often made up of speaking invitations. Most Americans, white and black, appear to accept their stand on the podium for what Smith says it was: “a cry for freedom, not a cry for hate.”28
To an extent that might have astonished their younger selves, Carlos and Smith have even been embraced by the Olympic establishment: a poster of them in their most famous moment features prominently on the walls of the US Olympic Training Center.29
1968/1975
ARTHUR ASHE’S RACKETS
T
hese two rackets represent two of the transformations in modern tennis: money and technology.
Arthur Ashe used the wooden racket on the left to win the first US Open in 1968. From 1881 until 1968, America’s national tournament was for “amateurs” only. The quotation marks refer to a secret that was so open that it was no secret at all: that the best “shamateurs” were making a lot of money under the table.
Meanwhile, tennis pros led a hardscrabble existence, staying in sponsors’ homes and playing one-night stands. Official tennis treated them as if they smelled. The situation was absurd, and had been so for decades. Golf, hardly the most wild-eyed of institutions, had sponsored open tournaments for decades, featuring both amateurs and professionals. Civilization had survived. It made no sense that most of the best tennis players were unable to play in the most prestigious tournaments (see the 1959 entry). After Wimbledon indicated in late 1967 that it would accept professionals, the tide turned. “Open” tennis—tournaments in which both professionals and amateurs could play—hit the courts in 1968.
Ashe, a UCLA graduate then serving as a US Army officer, was an amateur when he won the first US Open. If he had been a professional, he would have taken home $14,000. (The women’s winner, Virginia Wade, earned $6,000.)1 Ashe missed the era of outrageous money—in 2015, the US Open singles champions earned $3.3 million each2—but he did well, earning almost $1.6 million3 in prize money and 33 singles titles during his career.
His best year was 1975, when he won nine tournaments and was ranked number 1 for a time.4 That year he also recorded his greatest victory, upsetting Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon. Few thought that Ashe’s power game could prevail against Connors’s abilities as a counterpuncher. Ashe, 31, didn’t disagree; he had lost to the 22-year-old Connors the only three times they had played.5 So Ashe changed tactics, feeding Connors low off-speed forehands, luring him into the net, and then lobbing him to death.6 He won in four sets.
It was a popular victory. A great and passionate player, Connors was also often vulgar, grabbing his crotch and bellowing profanities. Ashe, by contrast, wore his dignity like armor. There were other differences that fed into the frank dislike between the two. Ashe was a Davis Cup stalwart; Connors couldn’t be bothered. Ashe was one of the founders and longtime president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, created to protect players’ interests. Connors was the only leading player not to join. For all these reasons, Ashe’s victory “spread happiness and satisfaction,” wrote British tennis journalist Richard Evans, “because it had turned a good man into a great champion.”7
The racket on the right on the previous page, a Head Competition, is the one Ashe used to beat Connors. It is so obviously different from the other that it is remarkable that only seven years separate the two. The 1968 racket is made of wood and not all that different than what Bill Tilden would have used during his career (see the 1930 entry on Tilden). The 1975 racket is a composite made of glass fiber and aluminum with a foam core,8 and a longer, sleeker shape.9 Ashe had been working with aluminum or composite rackets since 1969, making him a very early adopter of advanced technology.
For that, thank (or curse) Howard Head, an aircraft engineer who revolutionized two sports. Skiing was first. When he picked up the sport, Head found wooden skis difficult to use. Aircraft materials, he thought, might be better. So he went to work and figured out how to combine aluminum, adhesives, and other materials to create a ski that made turning easier and that never warped. Purists nicknamed them the “cheaters”;10 everyone else called them a godsend. Head skis were being sold by 1950 and quickly dominated the market.11
Retiring in 1969, Head took up tennis and had a similar experience: he wasn’t very good. Again he looked at the equipment, and again, he thought modern technology could improve on wood (or steel, which Jimmy Connors’s famous T2000 was made of). Composite materials were lighter and more flexible than wood, but could be strung tighter and so delivered more power. The year after Ashe’s Wimbledon triumph, the Head-designed Prince Classic came out. The first oversized racket, it had a “sweet spot” of 110 square inches, compared to 65 for the average wooden racket.12 Weekend warriors took to the oversized composites immediately, and the pros were not far behind.13 Players won big tournaments using wooden rackets into the early 1980s, but by the middle of the decade, wood was gone forever, banished to museums and tag sales.
While all this matters in terms of the evolution of tennis, to speak of Ashe in terms of only money and science is to miss the point. Tennis gave him a platform, but as an African American and a man of the world, he used his fame to build a much more substantive legacy.
Beginning in the 1970s, he became a committed opponent of apartheid. He visited South Africa several times that decade, after being rejected for a visa repeatedly—a reproof that became a high-level diplomatic issue. He insisted that the events he played in be integrated (the South African government reneged), and he visited townships and held clinics that included black children. After the massacres during the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which hundreds were killed, his attitude hardened. In 1983 he cofounded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, which encouraged them not to perform in South Africa.
Ashe always made a distinction between the South African regime and South Africans. For example, he favored banning the country from the Davis Cup but opposed excluding individual South Africans from tennis.14 He worked with such sustained commitment that when reporters asked Nelson Mandela who he would like to meet after his release from prison in 1990 after 27 years, he responded, “Arthur Ashe.” They did meet, in 1991.
Back home, Ashe was a forceful and sometimes controversial voice on social issues. When the National Collegiate Athletic Association imposed academic standards on athletes, for example, critics opposed them on the grounds that they were set too high for many black high schoolers to meet. Ashe opposed them because he thought the standards were too low.15 He often endured boos when he criticized what he saw as the self-inflicted wounds of certain aspects of African American society.16 But he didn’t back down. Instead, he backed up his words with his money and time, founding urban health and education programs. And when he was teaching a course on the black athlete, he realized that there was almost no material on the subject. So he spent six years researching A Hard Road to Glory, a three-volume history that came out in 1988.
Ashe retired from tennis in 1979 due to heart problems; during a 1983 operation, he was transfused with infected blood, and he was later diagnosed with AIDS. He made the diagnosis public in 1992—and then, naturally, began fund-raising and outreach about the disease. He spent much of his last year working on his autobiography, Days of Grace, in which he wrote this extraordinary sentence: “I am a fortunate, blessed man. Aside from AIDS and heart disease, I have no problems.”17 He died a week after the book came out—and 15 months before Mandela was elected president of South Africa.
On his death in 1993, Virginia ordered the state flags flown at half-mast, and his body lay in the governor’s mansion, the first man to be so honored since Stonewall Jackson in 1863. In 1997 the main stadium at the USTA National Tennis Center was named for him. And in a gesture he might have appreciated even more, his hometown of Richmond, where he saw “no colored” signs as a child, paid him its ultimate homage. The city’s famed Monument Avenue, which is lined with statues of Confederate heroes, added a new one: Arthur Ashe. A scholar-athlete who always thought about the next generation, in the statue Ashe is ringed by children. He is carrying books in one hand and a racket in the other.
1968
ROBERTO CLEMENTE BASEBALL CARD
B
aseball players are not saints. So at first blush, it seems odd that there is a sincere if quixotic effort to canonize one as such. But when that ballplayer is Roberto Clemente—well, the idea is still quixotic but not quite laughable.1 Clemente died on New Year’s Eve in 1972, taking supplies from his home in Puerto Rico to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. In 1973 the game’s award for charitable work was named after him in honor of his death and his life. During his 18-year career, Clemente was one of the most respected players in the game. With the perspective of history, he can be seen as a living bridge between a game whose players were all-American to one that fully embraced talent born outside the United States.
Clemente, who was signed by Branch Rickey shortly after the general manager left Brooklyn (see 1947 entry on Jackie Robinson), toiled in the relative obscurity of Pittsburgh. At first the Pirates were bad, and when they got good, they were still in Pittsburgh. Most fans could see the Bucs on television once or twice a year, if that. During the 1971 World Series, though, Clemente emphatically made his presence known. Then 37 and the oldest player on either team, he batted .414, getting at least one hit in every game, and won the MVP. But those bald facts do not convey the reality of this athletic and aesthetic tour de force, in which he also displayed his arm and his base-running skills. “He was just magic to watch,” said teammate Steve Blass.2 In the locker room after the final victory, Clemente politely interrupted an interview to send a message home to his parents, in Spanish. He wanted to share his moment with the people and place that he loved.
The 1971 Series was Clemente’s finest athletic hour, but he had already clocked a brilliant career. Known as a bad-ball hitter, he didn’t walk much, but had such a shrewd sense of his own strike zone that he rarely struck out, either; his career batting average was .317. His arm was remarkable. For this, he credited two things: throwing the javelin in high school, and his mother, who was apparently a gamer.3 He was an excellent base-runner who ran everything out and took the extra base with controlled aggression. Using a complicated metric that combines everything that happens on the field, plus some other statistical razzle-dazzle, Clemente is the highest-rated right fielder in history based on the number of runs he was worth over his career.4 He won the MVP award once—beating out Sandy Koufax in 1966—and from 1960 to 1972 finished among the top dozen nine times. He also won 4 batting titles and 12 straight Gold Gloves. In his last regular season at-bat, he clubbed a double for his 3,000th hit, becoming the eleventh man to reach that milestone.
Athletically and culturally, Clemente was more than the sum of his statistics. While there had been Latin American players before, including from Puerto Rico,5 he was the first great one. And in important ways, he set the template for how Latin players should be treated—the same, he insisted, as anyone else.
This baseball card represents a small point in that evolution. For years, writers, broadcasters, and even baseball cards, as this one from 1968 proves, referred to Clemente as “Bob” or “Bobby,” even though he had made it clear his name was Roberto.6 By the time of his death, he was definitively and only Roberto. He had made his point, and that meant the many Latin Americans who followed never had to explain themselves that way again. The poet Enrique Zorrilla caught Clemente’s spirit when he said that he had “the fire of dignity.”7
It was a fire heated in harsh conditions. When Clemente made the majors in 1955, at age 20, a number of teams still had no black players, and segregation during spring training and in certain cities was the norm. Clemente was black; in addition, at the time his English was limited. Sportswriters took cruel pleasure in reproducing his speech along the lines of “Next time hup I heet ze ball” and “I no play so gut yet.”8
Over time he earned everyone else’s respect, then a great deal of affection, and eventually something like reverence. By 1960 the Pirates’ popular radio announcer, Bob Prince, was shouting “!Arriba!, Roberto!”9 when he did something great, and fans made the phrase their own. Clemente took the lead in insisting that the Pirates delay opening the season until after the funeral of his friend and hero, Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971, when Three Rivers Stadium opened, Roberto Clemente Night in July was one of the biggest occasions of the year. The place was packed—and the ceremony was in both Spanish and English.
Clemente was considered temperamental (not without cause)10 and seemed to positively revel in feeling misunderstood. He complained early and often of not getting the credit he deserved,11 which was true. He turned these grievances into performance; pride and anger were fuel for his competitive fire. As his confidence grew, in both his game and his English, he matured into a leader, not only among his Pirates teammates and other Latin players but in general. He was a forceful voice in the emerging players’ union.12
In addition, there was a basic decency to the man that may not reach to sainthood, but is still far from common. He would apologize for shortness of temper or when he misunderstood someone else. In 1972, long established as one of the greats, he still stayed in the dorms at Pirate City, where young players hung on his every word.13 Remember those stories of ballplayers quietly visiting kids in hospitals? Clemente actually did.
After his death, Puerto Rico declared three days of mourning. The Pirates retired his number. Major league baseball waived the five-year waiting period, and Clemente was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1973. Having played his entire career in Pittsburgh, he may be the player most closely associated with the team. When the Pirates endured 20 straight losing seasons from 1993 through 2012—tied for the longest such streak in North American sports history—many people choked at the idea of a twenty-first, which would associate epic failure with their hero, who wore number 21. (The Pirates escaped that fate, going to the playoffs in 2013.)
Clemente’s unusual combination of athletic and human gifts has ensured he is not forgotten. There are Roberto Clemente schools and parks everywhere, as well as hospitals and sports leagues. Best of all, though, may be the yellow Roberto Clemente Bridge over the Allegheny River. On game days it’s closed to cars, and fans can walk across it, step past a Roberto Clemente statue, and see a ballgame.
BENCH FROM THE ICE BOWL
It introduced the phrase “the frozen tundra” to the football lexicon. It provided the coda to what may be the best football book ever written, Instant Replay. It was the end of the Green Bay Packers dynasty. The game forever known as the Ice Bowl, played on December 31, 1967, was terrific sport. What made it the stuff of legend were the conditions. At game time, the temperature was minus 13 degrees; with the wind chill, it felt like minus 48.1
It also featured two of the greatest coaches in National Football League history, Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys and Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers. From their days on the New York Giants in the 1950s, when Landry ran the defense and Lombardi the offense, the two had mixed respect and rivalry. Landry was a quiet stoic from Texas. Lombardi was a passionate loudmouth from Brooklyn. In other ways, their characters were similar: they were both religious, intense, and driven.
Lombardi was the first to leave New York, taking over the browbeaten Packers in 1959; the team hadn’t had a winning season in 11 years. From then through 1967, he led it to a record of 89 wins, 29 losses, and four ties,2 winning six conference titles and five championships, including the first two Super Bowls.
Landry took over the expansion Cowboys in 1960 and didn’t have a good team until 1966, when the team lost a heartbreaker to the Packers in the conference championship, 34–27. But the Packers were beginning to age, while the Cowboys were a team on the rise. Going into this game, Lombardi had ulcers; Landry had the sense his time had come.
Neither man had anticipated the arctic front that drove temperatures down 30 degrees overnight. It was so cold that the electric coils beneath Lambeau Field, installed to keep the field playable, also froze. The teams played on a rock-hard field, with a layer of ice on top. The officials could not use their whistles because they stuck to their lips. Several players got frostbite, and one fan died of exposure. Before the game, announcer Frank Gifford set the tone with the comment, “I think I’ll take another bite of my coffee.”3
One end of this bench, used by the Packers, was popular because it was adjacent to the warmer—which then ran out of fuel.4 There was no respite.
The Packers forged a 14–0 lead early in the second quarter, but the Cowboys turned two turnovers into 10 points and trailed at the half only 14–10, a score that held up into the fourth quarter. Then, showing some razzle-dazzle, the Cowboys ran an option play in which running back Dan Reeves, who had taken a handoff, found wide receiver Lance Rentzel for a 50-yard touchdown. With 4:50 left, Dallas was ahead for the first time, 17–14.
Starting from their own 32, the Packers began The Drive. “This is it,” quarterback Bart Starr told his teammates. “We’re going in.”5 Mixing short passes and runs, the Pack marched down the field with relentless efficiency. All 11 men knew exactly what they needed to do and did it. Lombardi emphasized fundamentals and execution; The Drive exemplified both. With less than a minute left, if was first and goal from the one. Twice, the Packers tried to run it in. Twice, the Cowboys held.
With 16 seconds left, Starr took the final timeout. The percentage play was to try a pass; if it fell incomplete, there would be time to kick a field goal to tie. But the pass protection had been poor all day. Starr’s idea was to lunge into the end zone between the center and the guard.6 “Let’s run it,” Lombardi agreed, “and get the hell out of here.”7 In the huddle, Starr called “31 wedge and I’ll carry the ball.”8 The key was for right guard Jerry Kramer to push Jethro Pugh out of the way. He did, hitting him low, while center Ken Bowman pushed Pugh back. Starr slipped through, and the Packers won, 21–17.
In the winners’ locker room, Kramer said of Lombardi, “This is one beautiful man.”9 Kramer did not love Lombardi all the time, something that comes across in his book, Instant Replay. But he realized that it was Lombardi who had instilled in the Packers the will, and the capabilities, to compete the way they had.
In the losers’ locker room, Cowboys’ quarterback Don Meredith expressed pride in his teammates and mused that in a sense there was no loser in the game, because all involved had displayed such courage. His eloquence was impressive and played a role in ABC calling him a couple of years later to join a new show, Monday Night Football (see the 1970 entry on MNF). There he would be Dandy Don, class clown; on December 31, 1967, he was Don Meredith, Cowboy poet.
The Packers would beat the Raiders in the Super Bowl and become the first (and still only) team to win three championships in a row.10 Landry’s time would indeed come; he would win two Super Bowls with the Cowboys in the 1970s.
1968
STATUE OF TOMMIE SMITH AND JOHN CARLOS
I
n November 2005 San Jose State University unveiled this 22-foot-high statue featuring two of its former students, Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The statue, and the photo on which it is based, not only freeze a moment in time but wordlessly crystallize the complicated problems that exist at the intersection of race, sports, and society. Those problems have not been resolved; only the details have changed. That is why the moment has retained its power. The photo has become one of the most iconic moments of Olympic history, indeed of twentieth-century American history.
In broad terms, this silent gesture was the end result of a lifetime of racial insult. More narrowly, it was the culmination of about a year of activism among a wide range of black American male athletes.
In late 1967 San Jose State professor Harry Edwards founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR).1 The group had some local successes, forcing a number of universities to take black grievances seriously and disrupting what would have been the New York Athletic Club’s 100th-anniversary celebrations, when many of the best black athletes (and a good many white ones) refused to compete at the all-white, all-Christian club. But the OPHR’s Olympic goals—the resignation of leader Avery Brundage and the banning of South Africa and Rhodesia, in particular—seemed destined to fail. In February 1968, after a five-year absence, South Africa was readmitted to the Games. That decision reinforced the idea that black Americans should boycott the Mexico City Olympics in October,2 not only in protest against apartheid South Africa, but also against racial inequities at home.
The idea was controversial, not only among Brundage and the Olympic establishment, but also among the black athletes themselves. When South Africa was banned again in April, much of the momentum went out of the boycott movement.3 Most of the male African American athletes surveyed wanted to compete.4 Interestingly, black women were not even asked for their opinion; Wyomia Tyus (see the 1952 entry on the Tigerbelles) was more than a little ticked, saying later that she was “appalled . . . that the men simply took us for granted,” assuming that the women would do “whatever we were told.”5 The point became moot. In the end, even the leaders of OPHR, such as John Carlos, Lee Evans, and Tommie Smith, went to Mexico City to compete.
But while the boycott had imploded, the idea of using the Olympics as a platform had not. Carlos and Smith decided that after the 200-meter race—they were confident that they would both medal—they would make the podium “a festival of visual symbols to express our feelings.”6 When the race started, Carlos took the lead, but near the bend, Smith turned on what had become known as the “Tommie jets” and surged past him. Australian Peter Norman nipped Carlos with a few meters left to take second. Smith set a world record 19.83 seconds that lasted for more than a decade.
Exhilarated and relieved, the two men changed into their warm-up suits, then prepared themselves. They each put on one black glove and took off their shoes; Smith wore a scarf and Carlos some beads. Norman, in solidarity with the two sprinters, whom he had come to like and respect, wore an OPHR button.7 The three stepped up to their respective places, and when the “Star Spangled Banner” began to play, Smith, an army reserve officer, straightened his back and raised his black-gloved right arm straight up while he bent his head.8 Carlos, in a more relaxed pose, raised his left arm. In stillness, they listened to the anthem of a nation to which they were profoundly connected but from which they were also deeply detached.9 The crowd, too, was still, or in Carlos’s memorable phrase, “you honestly could have heard a frog piss on cotton.” Then came the boos, as well as a scattering of cheers. The two were hustled out of the stadium.
Shortly afterward Smith explained the symbolism of their act. His raised right hand was for the power of black America; Carlos’s left was for the unity of black America. The black scarf was for black pride; the black beads represented the history of lynching10 and the black socks and no shoes the prevalence of poverty. “The totality of our effort,” Smith concluded, “was the regaining of black dignity.”11
Avery Brundage did not see it that way. One of the most consequential Olympic figures of the twentieth century, he is also the most controversial. On almost any subject of substance, he could be relied on to do the wrong thing, in the wrong way. This was one of those times.
The members of the US Olympic Committee (USOC), while not happy with the protest, were inclined to do nothing about it.12 As far as they were concerned, it was over. Brundage and the International Olympic Committee, however, were enraged. The protest violated the “universally accepted principle,” the IOC stated, that politics “play no part whatsoever” in the Olympics.13
Perhaps this is the place to spike the idea that politics and sports don’t mix. They do, and in the case of the Olympics, they always have. Greece agreed to host the first modern games in 1896, for example, in part to bolster the standing of its not-very-robust monarchy.14 The IOC dealt only with national committees, the Games began with the parade of nations, athletes performed as members of national teams, and victors heard their national anthems.15 Somehow, none of that counted as political.
The USOC was ordered to expel the two from the Olympic Village and the American team,16 or the whole US track team would be kicked out.17 The US officials complied and also offered an apology. For Carlos and Smith, the sanctions were meaningless; they were already moving out of the Village, and they had no more events.18 They were not stripped of their medals. The ban from international competition hurt, however. Smith’s athletic career ended on that podium. As New York Times sports columnist Red Smith (no relation) would later note, the IOC’s heavy-handed reaction turned a simple gesture that might have been forgotten into an international incident.19
Carlos and Smith were not the only ones to bring protest politics to the podium in 1968. There was also Vera Čáslavská. The great Czech gymnast had been an outspoken advocate of the Prague Spring, the effort to diminish Soviet influence and liberalize the country. After the Soviet invasion in 1968, she fled to the mountains, where she trained by lifting sacks of potatoes and swinging from trees.20 At the last minute, she was allowed to go to Mexico City, where she won six medals, including a tie for gold in the floor exercise with a Soviet athlete. When the Soviet anthem played, Čáslavská turned her head down and away, a subtle, sad Cold War Pietà.21 The IOC imposed no punishment for her unmistakable gesture. Perhaps it knew it wouldn’t have to. On her return to Czechoslovakia, Čáslavská was essentially banned from sports and public life for the next 17 years.22 Nor did anyone in the Olympic movement see fit to protest the treatment of Emil Zátopek, a triple gold winner in the 1952 Olympics. Also a supporter of the Prague Spring, Zátopek was expelled from the Communist Party; fired from his job; stripped of his military rank; and required to work as a garbage collector, street sweeper, and miner.23
And that was not even the worst of it for poor Czechoslovakia when it came to the dangerous intersection of sports and politics. That low moment came in March 1950, when the secret police convicted all but one member of the country’s ice hockey team24 on charges including treason, espionage, and slander. Their real crime was that the authorities thought some of them were considering defection. After months of brutal treatment,25 the players were sentenced to terms ranging from 1 to 15 years in prison. Most were amnestied in 1955, having spent years as forced laborers, some of them down uranium mines. The IOC had nothing to say about this, either, though many of the players had competed on the 1948 silver-medal Olympic team.
These are examples of individuals and governments taking action, but in terms of things over which the IOC has sole authority, politics are still ubiquitous. In 1908, for example, Finland was allowed to have its own team, but not to show its flag. Serbia, which was then part of the Austria-Hungary empire, had its own two-man team in 1912, a privilege accorded to none of the other bits and pieces that made up that empire. The decision not to invite Germany and its World War I allies (Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey) to the 1920 Games in Antwerp was clearly political; nor was Germany welcome in 1924, 1948, or 1952. The winner of the 1936 marathon, Sohn Kee-chung, ran under the Japanese flag and under a Japanese name, Son Kitei. Sohn was, in fact, Korean, which was an unhappy colony of Japan and not allowed to compete in its own right.26 After the war the highly political question of how many Germanies to allow, and under what flag and banner, was not settled until 1972. And that was comparatively simple compared to the endless wrangling over what to call Taiwan, once the People’s Republic of China decided to reenter the Olympic arena at the 1980 Winter Olympics.27 Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but not when it comes to the Olympics; they compete independently. In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was still a Yugoslavia, but also a Slovenia and Croatia, which had not yet been recognized by the United Nations at that point.
In this context, then, the outrage directed at Tommy Smith and John Carlos appears both ridiculous and hypocritical. Sending an Olympic team down the uranium mines is met with indifferent silence, but when two black Americans make a peaceful, purposeful, and dignified gesture, the outrage is instant.
Sometimes, though, the arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, or at least vindication. Over the last couple of decades, Carlos and Smith have put their critics behind them. Rather than the misspelled and frightening death threats they endured for years, now their mail is more often made up of speaking invitations. Most Americans, white and black, appear to accept their stand on the podium for what Smith says it was: “a cry for freedom, not a cry for hate.”28
To an extent that might have astonished their younger selves, Carlos and Smith have even been embraced by the Olympic establishment: a poster of them in their most famous moment features prominently on the walls of the US Olympic Training Center.29
1968/1975
ARTHUR ASHE’S RACKETS
T
hese two rackets represent two of the transformations in modern tennis: money and technology.
Arthur Ashe used the wooden racket on the left to win the first US Open in 1968. From 1881 until 1968, America’s national tournament was for “amateurs” only. The quotation marks refer to a secret that was so open that it was no secret at all: that the best “shamateurs” were making a lot of money under the table.
Meanwhile, tennis pros led a hardscrabble existence, staying in sponsors’ homes and playing one-night stands. Official tennis treated them as if they smelled. The situation was absurd, and had been so for decades. Golf, hardly the most wild-eyed of institutions, had sponsored open tournaments for decades, featuring both amateurs and professionals. Civilization had survived. It made no sense that most of the best tennis players were unable to play in the most prestigious tournaments (see the 1959 entry). After Wimbledon indicated in late 1967 that it would accept professionals, the tide turned. “Open” tennis—tournaments in which both professionals and amateurs could play—hit the courts in 1968.
Ashe, a UCLA graduate then serving as a US Army officer, was an amateur when he won the first US Open. If he had been a professional, he would have taken home $14,000. (The women’s winner, Virginia Wade, earned $6,000.)1 Ashe missed the era of outrageous money—in 2015, the US Open singles champions earned $3.3 million each2—but he did well, earning almost $1.6 million3 in prize money and 33 singles titles during his career.
His best year was 1975, when he won nine tournaments and was ranked number 1 for a time.4 That year he also recorded his greatest victory, upsetting Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon. Few thought that Ashe’s power game could prevail against Connors’s abilities as a counterpuncher. Ashe, 31, didn’t disagree; he had lost to the 22-year-old Connors the only three times they had played.5 So Ashe changed tactics, feeding Connors low off-speed forehands, luring him into the net, and then lobbing him to death.6 He won in four sets.
It was a popular victory. A great and passionate player, Connors was also often vulgar, grabbing his crotch and bellowing profanities. Ashe, by contrast, wore his dignity like armor. There were other differences that fed into the frank dislike between the two. Ashe was a Davis Cup stalwart; Connors couldn’t be bothered. Ashe was one of the founders and longtime president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, created to protect players’ interests. Connors was the only leading player not to join. For all these reasons, Ashe’s victory “spread happiness and satisfaction,” wrote British tennis journalist Richard Evans, “because it had turned a good man into a great champion.”7
The racket on the right on the previous page, a Head Competition, is the one Ashe used to beat Connors. It is so obviously different from the other that it is remarkable that only seven years separate the two. The 1968 racket is made of wood and not all that different than what Bill Tilden would have used during his career (see the 1930 entry on Tilden). The 1975 racket is a composite made of glass fiber and aluminum with a foam core,8 and a longer, sleeker shape.9 Ashe had been working with aluminum or composite rackets since 1969, making him a very early adopter of advanced technology.
For that, thank (or curse) Howard Head, an aircraft engineer who revolutionized two sports. Skiing was first. When he picked up the sport, Head found wooden skis difficult to use. Aircraft materials, he thought, might be better. So he went to work and figured out how to combine aluminum, adhesives, and other materials to create a ski that made turning easier and that never warped. Purists nicknamed them the “cheaters”;10 everyone else called them a godsend. Head skis were being sold by 1950 and quickly dominated the market.11
Retiring in 1969, Head took up tennis and had a similar experience: he wasn’t very good. Again he looked at the equipment, and again, he thought modern technology could improve on wood (or steel, which Jimmy Connors’s famous T2000 was made of). Composite materials were lighter and more flexible than wood, but could be strung tighter and so delivered more power. The year after Ashe’s Wimbledon triumph, the Head-designed Prince Classic came out. The first oversized racket, it had a “sweet spot” of 110 square inches, compared to 65 for the average wooden racket.12 Weekend warriors took to the oversized composites immediately, and the pros were not far behind.13 Players won big tournaments using wooden rackets into the early 1980s, but by the middle of the decade, wood was gone forever, banished to museums and tag sales.
While all this matters in terms of the evolution of tennis, to speak of Ashe in terms of only money and science is to miss the point. Tennis gave him a platform, but as an African American and a man of the world, he used his fame to build a much more substantive legacy.
Beginning in the 1970s, he became a committed opponent of apartheid. He visited South Africa several times that decade, after being rejected for a visa repeatedly—a reproof that became a high-level diplomatic issue. He insisted that the events he played in be integrated (the South African government reneged), and he visited townships and held clinics that included black children. After the massacres during the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which hundreds were killed, his attitude hardened. In 1983 he cofounded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, which encouraged them not to perform in South Africa.
Ashe always made a distinction between the South African regime and South Africans. For example, he favored banning the country from the Davis Cup but opposed excluding individual South Africans from tennis.14 He worked with such sustained commitment that when reporters asked Nelson Mandela who he would like to meet after his release from prison in 1990 after 27 years, he responded, “Arthur Ashe.” They did meet, in 1991.
Back home, Ashe was a forceful and sometimes controversial voice on social issues. When the National Collegiate Athletic Association imposed academic standards on athletes, for example, critics opposed them on the grounds that they were set too high for many black high schoolers to meet. Ashe opposed them because he thought the standards were too low.15 He often endured boos when he criticized what he saw as the self-inflicted wounds of certain aspects of African American society.16 But he didn’t back down. Instead, he backed up his words with his money and time, founding urban health and education programs. And when he was teaching a course on the black athlete, he realized that there was almost no material on the subject. So he spent six years researching A Hard Road to Glory, a three-volume history that came out in 1988.
Ashe retired from tennis in 1979 due to heart problems; during a 1983 operation, he was transfused with infected blood, and he was later diagnosed with AIDS. He made the diagnosis public in 1992—and then, naturally, began fund-raising and outreach about the disease. He spent much of his last year working on his autobiography, Days of Grace, in which he wrote this extraordinary sentence: “I am a fortunate, blessed man. Aside from AIDS and heart disease, I have no problems.”17 He died a week after the book came out—and 15 months before Mandela was elected president of South Africa.
On his death in 1993, Virginia ordered the state flags flown at half-mast, and his body lay in the governor’s mansion, the first man to be so honored since Stonewall Jackson in 1863. In 1997 the main stadium at the USTA National Tennis Center was named for him. And in a gesture he might have appreciated even more, his hometown of Richmond, where he saw “no colored” signs as a child, paid him its ultimate homage. The city’s famed Monument Avenue, which is lined with statues of Confederate heroes, added a new one: Arthur Ashe. A scholar-athlete who always thought about the next generation, in the statue Ashe is ringed by children. He is carrying books in one hand and a racket in the other.
1968
ROBERTO CLEMENTE BASEBALL CARD
B
aseball players are not saints. So at first blush, it seems odd that there is a sincere if quixotic effort to canonize one as such. But when that ballplayer is Roberto Clemente—well, the idea is still quixotic but not quite laughable.1 Clemente died on New Year’s Eve in 1972, taking supplies from his home in Puerto Rico to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. In 1973 the game’s award for charitable work was named after him in honor of his death and his life. During his 18-year career, Clemente was one of the most respected players in the game. With the perspective of history, he can be seen as a living bridge between a game whose players were all-American to one that fully embraced talent born outside the United States.
Clemente, who was signed by Branch Rickey shortly after the general manager left Brooklyn (see 1947 entry on Jackie Robinson), toiled in the relative obscurity of Pittsburgh. At first the Pirates were bad, and when they got good, they were still in Pittsburgh. Most fans could see the Bucs on television once or twice a year, if that. During the 1971 World Series, though, Clemente emphatically made his presence known. Then 37 and the oldest player on either team, he batted .414, getting at least one hit in every game, and won the MVP. But those bald facts do not convey the reality of this athletic and aesthetic tour de force, in which he also displayed his arm and his base-running skills. “He was just magic to watch,” said teammate Steve Blass.2 In the locker room after the final victory, Clemente politely interrupted an interview to send a message home to his parents, in Spanish. He wanted to share his moment with the people and place that he loved.
The 1971 Series was Clemente’s finest athletic hour, but he had already clocked a brilliant career. Known as a bad-ball hitter, he didn’t walk much, but had such a shrewd sense of his own strike zone that he rarely struck out, either; his career batting average was .317. His arm was remarkable. For this, he credited two things: throwing the javelin in high school, and his mother, who was apparently a gamer.3 He was an excellent base-runner who ran everything out and took the extra base with controlled aggression. Using a complicated metric that combines everything that happens on the field, plus some other statistical razzle-dazzle, Clemente is the highest-rated right fielder in history based on the number of runs he was worth over his career.4 He won the MVP award once—beating out Sandy Koufax in 1966—and from 1960 to 1972 finished among the top dozen nine times. He also won 4 batting titles and 12 straight Gold Gloves. In his last regular season at-bat, he clubbed a double for his 3,000th hit, becoming the eleventh man to reach that milestone.
Athletically and culturally, Clemente was more than the sum of his statistics. While there had been Latin American players before, including from Puerto Rico,5 he was the first great one. And in important ways, he set the template for how Latin players should be treated—the same, he insisted, as anyone else.
This baseball card represents a small point in that evolution. For years, writers, broadcasters, and even baseball cards, as this one from 1968 proves, referred to Clemente as “Bob” or “Bobby,” even though he had made it clear his name was Roberto.6 By the time of his death, he was definitively and only Roberto. He had made his point, and that meant the many Latin Americans who followed never had to explain themselves that way again. The poet Enrique Zorrilla caught Clemente’s spirit when he said that he had “the fire of dignity.”7
It was a fire heated in harsh conditions. When Clemente made the majors in 1955, at age 20, a number of teams still had no black players, and segregation during spring training and in certain cities was the norm. Clemente was black; in addition, at the time his English was limited. Sportswriters took cruel pleasure in reproducing his speech along the lines of “Next time hup I heet ze ball” and “I no play so gut yet.”8
Over time he earned everyone else’s respect, then a great deal of affection, and eventually something like reverence. By 1960 the Pirates’ popular radio announcer, Bob Prince, was shouting “!Arriba!, Roberto!”9 when he did something great, and fans made the phrase their own. Clemente took the lead in insisting that the Pirates delay opening the season until after the funeral of his friend and hero, Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971, when Three Rivers Stadium opened, Roberto Clemente Night in July was one of the biggest occasions of the year. The place was packed—and the ceremony was in both Spanish and English.
Clemente was considered temperamental (not without cause)10 and seemed to positively revel in feeling misunderstood. He complained early and often of not getting the credit he deserved,11 which was true. He turned these grievances into performance; pride and anger were fuel for his competitive fire. As his confidence grew, in both his game and his English, he matured into a leader, not only among his Pirates teammates and other Latin players but in general. He was a forceful voice in the emerging players’ union.12
In addition, there was a basic decency to the man that may not reach to sainthood, but is still far from common. He would apologize for shortness of temper or when he misunderstood someone else. In 1972, long established as one of the greats, he still stayed in the dorms at Pirate City, where young players hung on his every word.13 Remember those stories of ballplayers quietly visiting kids in hospitals? Clemente actually did.
After his death, Puerto Rico declared three days of mourning. The Pirates retired his number. Major league baseball waived the five-year waiting period, and Clemente was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1973. Having played his entire career in Pittsburgh, he may be the player most closely associated with the team. When the Pirates endured 20 straight losing seasons from 1993 through 2012—tied for the longest such streak in North American sports history—many people choked at the idea of a twenty-first, which would associate epic failure with their hero, who wore number 21. (The Pirates escaped that fate, going to the playoffs in 2013.)
Clemente’s unusual combination of athletic and human gifts has ensured he is not forgotten. There are Roberto Clemente schools and parks everywhere, as well as hospitals and sports leagues. Best of all, though, may be the yellow Roberto Clemente Bridge over the Allegheny River. On game days it’s closed to cars, and fans can walk across it, step past a Roberto Clemente statue, and see a ballgame.
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