1938
TOWEL THROWN INTO THE RING AT THE FIGHT BETWEEN JOE LOUIS AND MAX SCHMELING
O
n the night of June 22, 1938, something unprecedented happened. Sixty million Americans sat by their radios and rooted for a black man to triumph. He did, in 124 seconds of savagely beautiful boxing.
In one corner was America’s Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion; in the other was Germany’s Max Schmeling, the only man who had ever beaten Louis as a pro. This was more than a fight. It was truth, justice, and the American way against a Nazi regime of unmistakable viciousness. “Joe,” President Roosevelt had told Louis a few weeks before, “we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.”1 Louis himself recognized the heavy symbolism of the occasion. “I knew I had to get Schmeling good,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The whole damned country was depending on me.” He also appreciated the irony of the moment, noting that he had solid support even in regions that were lynching fellow African Americans.2
Two years earlier, in a shocking upset, Schmeling had knocked Louis down in the fourth and out in the twelfth. To many Americans, the fact that Schmeling was white meant more than that he was foreign, and they were happy that Louis had lost. At news of Louis’s defeat, there was cheering in the House of Representatives.3
By 1938, however, as the news out of Germany had become progressively darker, opinions had changed. Now this was not just Louis versus Schmeling, but democracy versus fascism. Black Americans in particular were absorbed with every detail. To many, Louis was hope in boxing gloves, an inspiration and possibly a promise of better days ahead. “As a kid, Joe Louis was everything,” recalled Charles Rangel, the longtime US Congressman from Harlem. “He just was the epitome of racial pride.”4 No previous event had ever so consumed black America. America as a whole was only slightly less engaged and was largely united behind Louis.
Germany, of course, was solidly behind Schmeling. Although never a member of the Nazi Party, his victory over Louis in 1936 had made him a national icon of Aryan superiority. As many as 100 million people tuned in on radio worldwide, making the rematch the biggest sporting event in history to that date.
Shortly after 10:00 pm the opening bell rang, and Louis all but sprinted across the ring to attack. A few seconds later, he landed a solid left jab, and then a few more. A right to the jaw staggered the German. Clinging to the ropes, Schmeling absorbed punch after punch. At about 1:20 into the fight, Louis unloaded. Schmeling hung onto the rope with one glove; his body was open, and Louis drove his fists in again and again, alternating with blows to the head. A thudding right to the jaw dropped Schmeling. Brave but dazed, Schmeling rose off the mat at the count of two—to be met by another flurry of blows he could not defend against. He stumbled but didn’t quite go down. Louis backed off briefly, then went at his almost defenseless opponent, raining blows at will, climaxed by a crushing right to the jaw. Schmeling went down again, and this time would not get up. His handlers threw in this towel just two minutes and four seconds into the fight.5
Black America was beyond thrilled. “The black race is supreme tonight,” read a banner in Harlem.6 Poet Maya Angelou, then a 10-year-old girl, remembered listening to the fight in her grandmother’s Arkansas store: “Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother’s son. He was the strongest man in the world.”7
When America entered World War II, Louis donated several substantial purses to war-related funds—then he joined the army. “There’s a lot wrong with America, but nothin’ Hitler could fix,” he explained his decision to enlist.8 Assigned to a segregated unit, he offered boxing exhibitions to boost morale, but with one stipulation: the audience must be integrated. He also used his influence to help African American soldiers apply to officer candidate school. (Among them was Jackie Robinson; see 1947 entry.) By the end of the war, Louis was regarded by both blacks and whites as an American hero.
Time and lack of real competition had eroded his boxing skills, but persistent tax troubles kept Louis in the ring. In October 1951, after a young Rocky Marciano knocked him through the ropes, he called it quits. Louis retired with a record of 66–3, with 52 of the victories by knockout. He holds the record for the longest reign as champion—11 years and 10 months—and the most title defenses (25).
His larger achievement was a more subtle one. Louis was the first black man to be widely accepted by American society. That was a complicated matter. The previous black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, had positively reveled in irritating white America, with his gold teeth and white women. Promoters used Johnson’s controversial reign as an excuse to keep blacks out of the highest ranks of boxing.
Louis’s first fight, then, was to get a chance not only to fight, but to fight honestly. He tread cautiously. His managers advised him never to smile when he beat a white boxer and never to be seen with a white woman; they also groomed his table manners and coached him on how to speak in public. While Louis could turn a memorable phrase—“he can run but he can’t hide” is one of them—his public utterances were cautious to the point of banality. To some members of a later generation of black athletes, such discretion would be regarded with contempt; Muhammad Ali (see the 1975 entry on the Thrilla in Manila) called him an “Uncle Tom.”9
That is unfair. Louis showed what black Americans could achieve, given the chance. His success helped prepare the way for the general integration of sports and also allowed him to negotiate, and expand, the treacherous public space open to black Americans. When the black Jack Johnson beat the white Jim Jeffries in 1910, it touched off white-on-black violence all over the country10 that left 19 dead and 249 injured.11 When Louis beat Schmeling, most of the country celebrated with him. “White Americans,” concluded historian Gerald Early, “accepted Joe Louis as a sort of emblem of the US, an emblem of American democracy.”12 That had never happened before.
While Louis’s later years were deeply sad, punctuated by money, health, and marital troubles, they should not obscure his greatness as an athlete and the depth of his legacy as an American. Joe Louis, said author Richard Wright, “was the concentrated essence of black triumph over white.”13 At the end, the country that had humiliated and hounded him finally offered him the respect he deserved: Louis was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
1943–1954
HANDBOOK FROM THE ALL-AMERICAN GIRLS PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUE
I
n the first half of the twentieth century, baseball was the undisputed national pastime for women as well as men. There were industrial softball leagues and tournaments and national organizations. By the early 1940s there were tens of thousands of women’s softball teams.1
During World War II this pool of talent found a new outlet. The need for military manpower hurt professional baseball; dozens of minor league teams closed down, and major league rosters were filled with near-middle-aged has-beens and never-wases. With factories hiring Rosie the Riveters to fill in for male factory workers, Cubs owner Philip Wrigley saw an opportunity for something similar: an all-women professional baseball league in case the majors had to be shut down. Scouts recruited from the extensive softball network, and in 1943 a four-team league debuted: the Kenosha Comets, the Racine Belles, the Rockford Peaches, and the South Bend Blue Sox.
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), as it became known, lasted 12 seasons, under three different ownerships. It eventually expanded to as many as 10 teams, all in the Midwest. That’s a pretty good run for a women’s team sport; many an effort since has gone under much faster. Salaries were not startling—$60 to $85 a week at first—but well above that of most munitions workers.2 The managers were men, including a number of former major leaguers, such as Bill Wambsganss, who turned the only unassisted triple play in World Series history in 1920, and Hall of Famer Jimmy Foxx.3
At first the women played softball, but the game evolved; it’s best to see the sport the women played as a hybrid between softball and baseball that got closer to the latter over time. By 1948 they were pitching overhand, using a hardball. The women showcased an energetic brand of baseball, running wild on the base-paths and sliding head-first, on account of their uniforms—a one-piece dress, cut four inches above the knees.
At a time when many physical educators of both sexes thought that competition coarsened girls, the league’s management placed an emphasis on femininity. Players took mandatory etiquette lessons and had to follow strict rules of conduct. The handbook pictured below, created by the league, gave advice on everything from speech (“no slang or slurry words”)4 to beauty routines and hygiene (shower after games and dry thoroughly) to sportsmanship and stretching. “You have certain responsibilities,” the guide noted, because you “are in the limelight.”5
On-field makeup was compulsory; one player recalled that a chaperone held her back from going to the plate in a tense situation until she refreshed her lipstick.6 The team chaperone had to approve all social engagements.7 In each town, there was a list of places not to go.8
All of this sounds both curious and condescending, but it was a calculated choice to make these athletes less threatening to the social mores they were so enthusiastically flouting. For these jocks, if the price of playing for real was makeup lessons and stupid rules, so be it.9 And drawing on talent from all over the country, Canada, and even Cuba—but no African Americans, even after Jackie Robinson had debuted10—the AAGPBL teams gave a chance to some 545 athletes.11 Wally Pipp, the man Lou Gehrig displaced at first base, called Dottie Kamenshek of the Rockford Peaches the “fanciest-fielding first baseman I’ve ever seen, male or female.”12
Although the AAGPBL was a wartime innovation, the league hit its peak after the fighting was over, attracting nearly a million fans in 1948.13 By the early 1950s, though, it was declining. Baseball was back, football was on the rise, and television was providing a different form of family entertainment. The league was also not managed as well as it had been under Wrigley and his successor. Spending on promotion and publicity plummeted, and so did attendance. The league died with a whimper in 1954.
But it had a very American resurrection, courtesy of Hollywood. In 1988 the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its “Women in Baseball” exhibit, and dozens of league alumni attended. So did filmmaker Penny Marshall.14 Four years later, Marshall released one of the few great baseball movies, A League of Their Own, about the AAGPBL during World War II. The film is not historically precise, and too many of the actors throw like girls; they would never have made the cut. But it captures the spirit of the enterprise, and the players, forgotten for decades, became hometown celebrities.
The movie also added a phrase to the game’s rich lexicon of clichés when the manager, played by Tom Hanks, barked at one of his players: “There’s no crying in baseball.” Of course there is. The players of the AAGPBL knew that as well as anyone. But to a woman, they also recalled their years as professional ballplayers as among the most joyous times of their lives.
1945
10TH MOUNTAIN DIVISION PARKA
T
he story of America’s most famous ski troops begins in Finland. During the Winter War of 1939–1940, the tiny country of fewer than four million people used its expertise in the snow to inflict more than 300,000 casualties on the Soviet invaders. The Finns could never win, but it took almost four months to subdue them; their unexpectedly effective resistance showed the potential of unconventional warfare on skis.1 An American named Charles Minot Dole, founder of the National Ski Patrol, took note. He argued that such a unit could also be useful to the US military. Army leaders were dubious, but a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, the War Department decided it was worth a try. That was the beginning of what became the 10th Mountain Division.2
The 10th had a number of great athletes in it, including Norwegian-born world ski-jumping champion Torger Tokle; Swiss championship downhiller Walter Prager; Austrian-born Toni Matt, who won two US downhill titles; and US Olympic field hockey player Bill Boddington. As those names suggest, the 10th was remarkably international; it was also conspicuously well educated. Skiing, at the time, was an elite sport embedded most prominently in eastern colleges; Dartmouth alone sent dozens of men. There were also lumberjacks, cowboys, ranchers, and outdoorsmen of all kinds. What drew them together was their love of the mountains. The division’s weekly newspaper, The Blizzard, featured pinups of slopes, not women.3 On leave, many would head to the hills, not the saloon. Those who did the latter were known to rappel down hotel walls for the heck of it. The 10th had style.
The romance of the “ski commandos” was irresistible. They got a spread in Life and the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Warner Brothers released what can only be called a Technicolor panegyric, Mountain Fighters. “And what men they are!” the narrator gushed. “There they go, the hard-hitting mountain troopers, the daredevils of the heights. They conquer mountains and men that liberty might live forever as they fight on to victory!” Fade to flag.4
In military terms, however, the 10th was a puzzle. The first officers knew a lot about the military but next to nothing about skiing or mountaineering; their men knew a lot about the outdoors and next to nothing about the military. The turning point was the establishment of a dedicated training center in late 1942, 9,250 feet above sea level, in Pando, Colorado, about 114 miles west of Denver. There, at Camp Hale, the three regiments that made up the division—the 85th, 86th, and 87th—trained for the better part of two years, in skiing, rock-climbing, winter survival, and mountain rescue and combat. Gradually, men and officers refined their equipment, including the first snowmobiles and snowcats.5
But when American troops hit the beaches of France on D-Day, Hollywood’s hard-hitting daredevils stayed in Colorado. No one quite knew what to do with them. Their firepower was light, and there was some skepticism about a division that was just so . . . different. In June 1944, much to the 10th’s dismay, they were relocated to the snakes, scorpions, and sweltering weather of Camp Swift in Texas.
Later that year they got their chance. Although Rome had surrendered to the Allies in 1943, Germany still held large chunks of northern Italy. The Nazis’ “Winter Line” stretched east to west, just below the top of the Italian boot, including a strong position on the tops of a series of ridges that were part of the Apennine Mountains. These blocked access to the Po valley and the route to Bologna and on through to Austria and southern Germany. Four times the Fifth Army tried to dislodge them; four times it was beaten back.6 Perhaps, the thinking went, this was a job for trained mountain troops.
The 10th got into position in January 1945 and sent out patrols, sometimes on their white-painted skis, to explore their surroundings—the only times the ski equipment saw use in Italy.7 On these missions, the troops would wear parkas like the one opposite; one side was snow white, the other olive, adaptable for use in different kinds of terrain.
As the patrols scouted the area, they determined that the key to breaking through the Winter Line was a series of peaks that became known as Riva Ridge. These overlooked the approaches to Mount Belvedere, which protected the road to Bologna. If the Allies could take Riva Ridge, they could move on to Mount Belvedere, but not vice versa—something the Fifth Army had learned at great human cost.
There was just one problem: getting up Riva Ridge. The Germans had fortified their positions with mines, barbed wire, and bunkers. Night after night, the men of the 10th probed and explored. Eventually, they mapped five routes up the lightly defended eastern face. Variously steep and muddy or steep and icy, the Germans considered it unclimbable.
The plan was simple. Climb 1,500 feet up the eastern face, in force, at night. Then surprise the Germans, establish a position, and hold it. At 7:30 on the evening of February 18, eight hundred men of the 86th regiment stalked silently up. They even unloaded their weapons lest an errant shot betray their positions. None of the trails required advanced mountaineering skills, but two of them were tricky enough to require ropes, which had been hammered into the rock a few days before. Negotiating even the easier terrain with full packs was a feat of conditioning that might have overwhelmed soldiers who lacked the 10th’s training.
If a single German had looked over the ridge, the men could have been picked off easily. But no one looked, and no dogs were on patrol. A providential fog descended. This made climbing more difficult, but much safer. Before dawn broke on February 19, everyone had reached the summit.
There the men of the 10th loaded their weapons, set up communications, and prepared for battle. Surprised but determined, the Germans counterattacked all along the crest of Riva Ridge. The 10th held them off. Supplies came up and the wounded went down via mules, men, and an ingenious portable tram.8 Allied forces also moved into Mount Belvedere. Less than a week after the 10th’s climb up Riva Ridge, the Germans fell back.
Over the next three months the 10th, supported by other American forces, as well as allies from Brazil, Italy, New Zealand, and Poland, chased the Germans off Belvedere, then across the Po valley, then over Lake Garda. In one case, the 10th advanced so fast that when they stumbled across the headquarters of the German 90th Panzer division, there was a fresh slice of bread and jam left on the table, with one bite gone.9 Allied forces were in sight of Austria when the German armies in Italy surrendered on May 2, six days before V-E Day. The 10th spent the following months enjoying themselves in the Alps. They were home by August.
The climb up Riva Ridge was the signature moment for the 10th—the only time the men had to use their special skills. But without that ascent, nothing else they did would have been possible. During its 114 days in combat, the 10th was credited with neutralizing five German divisions. It paid a heavy price: 975 dead and 3,871 wounded.10
Though it was part of the last division to enter the war, the 10th fought with an improvisational flair characteristic of more seasoned troops, never losing a battle. In his journal, the German general who surrendered to them called the 10th his “most dangerous opponent.”11
After the war, the story of the 10th continued to exert a hold. These troops were an especially interesting bunch. Two of the sons of the Trapp Family Singers fought with the 10th; so did Morley Nelson, who brought his goshawk with him to Camp Hale and then became Hollywood’s in-house falconer.12 Bill Bowerman went on to coach track at Oregon and cofound Nike (see the 1974 entry on the Waffle Trainer and the 1975 entry on Steve Prefontaine). Don Coryell was a National Football League head coach, leading the “Air Coryell” teams of the San Diego Chargers.13 Bob Dole, who came to the 10th as a wartime replacement, lost a kidney and the use of his right arm leading a patrol; he later was a US Senator from Kansas and the Republican presidential candidate in 1996.
Appropriately, the greatest postwar influence of the 10th was a collective one: the veterans helped to create the modern American ski industry. Five members were on the 1948 US Olympic ski team and a sixth was its coach. Members of the 10th founded almost two dozen ski areas, including Snow Valley in California; Arapahoe Basin, Aspen, Steamboat Springs, and Vail14 in Colorado; Waterville Valley (New Hampshire); Mount Bachelor (Oregon); and Sugarbush and Pico (Vermont). They managed or ran ski schools in dozens more; they made ski films, designed equipment, and organized competitions. Veterans of the 10th founded Skiing magazine. Don Goodman invented one of the first safety bindings.15 Monty Atwater became an expert in avalanche control. Jim Winthers began ski programs for the disabled. Robert Heron, the civilian engineer who designed the portable tram used to ferry supplies up Riva Ridge, designed generations of chairlifts.16 “We wanted to teach the country to ski,” said veteran Dick Wilson. “And we did.”17
1947
JACKIE ROBINSON’S JERSEY
T
his jersey is made of flannel, redolent of sweat—and full of stories.
One story is about 60 years of segregation. When Jackie Robinson donned a Dodgers jersey and took the field at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, he was the first black man to appear in a major league game since 1887.
A second story is about social change. Martin Luther King Jr. would say that Robinson was “a pilgrim that walked in the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”1
A third story is that of a man. Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born to a sharecropping family in south Georgia; his mother moved her five children to Pasadena, California, when he was an infant.2 After excelling in sports in high school, Robinson went on to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was the first student to letter in four sports.3 After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he joined the military and was eventually sent to officer candidate school (see the 1938 entry on Joe Louis). In Fort Hood, Texas, he had his own Rosa Parks moment, 11 years before her challenge to segregation, when he refused to move to the back of the bus while traveling to base in 1944. Acquitted after a court-martial, he left the army (or perhaps vice versa) and joined the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues.
At the same time that Robinson was playing second base for the Monarchs, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, was thinking about how to bring African Americans into the major leagues. In this he had the quiet support of the baseball commissioner, Happy Chandler, who noted that if blacks could die for their country in combat overseas, “they can play ball in America.”4 But Rickey also faced the quiet opposition of the 15 other major league clubs.5
An innovator who had pioneered the modern farm system and the use of statistical analysis, Rickey was both idealistic and shrewd. He genuinely felt it was long past time that black Americans be part of the national pastime; a devout Methodist, he refused to play baseball on Sunday during his conspicuously inglorious major league career (120 games over four years, with a career .239 batting average).
Rickey also knew there was a wealth of black talent that could improve his team and draw black fans to Dodgers’ games. And he knew it had to be done carefully. Before taking any action, he sought the advice of black leaders about what kind of player to recruit and how to manage the transition.6 To provide cover as he evaluated the talent, he floated the possibility of starting a new Negro League. Reports began to come back about an infielder named Robinson. Rickey sent his favorite scout, Clyde Sukeforth, to check him out.
In Jimmy Breslin’s happy phrase, Sukeforth “could go out for coffee and come back with a second baseman.”7 He was a shrewd judge of character as well as skills, and he liked what he saw and heard of Robinson. In August 1945 Rickey called Robinson in for a chat: “You were brought here, Jack Robinson, to play for the Brooklyn organization.”8 In October 1945, to no fanfare, Robinson signed a Brooklyn Dodgers contract. He spent the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, where he was spectacular, and made the big team out of spring training in Havana the following year. “My purpose,” said Rickey on the announcement of the signing, “is to be fair to all people, and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.”9
Even in retrospect, it is difficult to imagine a better choice to play the role of pioneer than the 28-year-old Jackie Robinson. With his college and military background, whites could not patronize him (though some tried). With his reputation for challenging racism, earned in both the military and the Negro Leagues, blacks respected him. With a loving and tough-minded wife, Rachel, he had a solid emotional foundation. And his own athletic abilities and strength of character allowed him to excel even as he faced vicious abuse.
While the white press certainly noticed the moment, the black press had a surer appreciation of its importance. For example, the edition of New York’s Amsterdam News that came out after his debut featured no fewer than 14 articles on Robinson,10 covering everything from his play (good) to how people should behave (no “loud and uncouth jokes”). Columnist Earl Brown was ahead of the game when he predicted that “Rickey will be remembered by posterity more for breaking the color bar in the big leagues than he will for any of the many other epochal things he has done in baseball.”11
It’s worth remembering, too, just how good a player Robinson was. Under extraordinary pressure, he had a career batting average of .311 and an on-base percentage of .409; he won the Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949. He was a dynamic base-runner who helped move the game away from its station-to-station lethargy. Most important, he was a competitor, who would steal home or lay down a bunt or break up a double-play to win a game. “He came to beat you,” said manager Leo Durocher. “He came to stuff the damn bat right up your ass.”12 Bill James, the baseball historian and statistical genius, ranked Robinson the 32nd best player ever.13
And Robinson did all this under a kind of pressure no other player has ever faced—from vicious bench-jockeying to isolation from his teammates14 to the extraordinary expectations of other black Americans. Infielder Ed Charles, who would have a solid major league career from 1962 to 1969, remembered how as a boy, he and his friends followed Robinson to the train station after watching him play in Florida: “When the train pulled out, we ran down the tracks listening for the sounds as far as we could. And when we couldn’t hear it any longer, we stopped and put our ears to the track so we could feel the vibrations of that train carrying Jackie Robinson.”15 Hank Aaron put it simply, “He gave us hope; he was the Dr. King of baseball.”16
Robinson was the first black American to excel in a white-dominated pro team sport. Previous African American stars, such as Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, had made their names in individual sports. Being part of a team, with all the implications of physical proximity and mutual dependence—that was different. Robinson’s success, playing side by side with white teammates, proved that he was equal to the moment. And it didn’t take long before his skills and character earned the Dodgers’ respect. When Philadelphia players were particularly abusive to him about six weeks into the 1947 season, other Dodgers rallied to Robinson’s defense. By 1949 Robinson would say that “racial tensions had almost completely dissipated” on the team.17 He and other black Dodgers, such as Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, would play key roles in Brooklyn’s only championship in 1955.
All this raised an interesting question: If blacks could excel while competing with whites at the highest level of baseball, and also become acknowledged leaders in the clubhouse, what else might they be capable of? Historian Cornel West put it this way: “More even than either Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, or Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, Jackie Robinson graphically symbolized and personified the challenge to the vicious legacy and ideology of white supremacy in American history.”18
Baseball likes to pat itself on the back for integrating a year before the military and many years before other major institutions. To some extent, it deserves that pat. But remember, too, how slowly it went; in 1953 most teams still didn’t have a single black player, and in 1960 the American League had all of six.19 Moreover, the baseball establishment also proved remarkably myopic about how it went about integration. For almost two decades after his debut, Robinson and the black Americans who followed frequently could not stay at the same hotels as their teammates. Well into the 1960s, teams were sending talented young black players to get minor league experience in the South Atlantic League, an experience that embittered everyone it touched (see the 1974 entry on Hank Aaron). There was next to no progress for 40 years in terms of bringing blacks into the business or management sides of baseball.
This speaks to a larger issue. While the integration of the major leagues was an important and positive historical moment, no substantive change comes without losers. In this case, the loser was the Negro Leagues. Blacks had been playing baseball for as long as the game existed. Beginning in the early 1900s, they played exhibition games against white teams, and often beat them. These contests regularly disproved the lie, peddled for years by baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and others, that the reason there were no blacks in major league baseball was because none had proved good enough.
With the founding of the Negro National League in 1920, African American players had an organized outlet for their talents. The pay wasn’t great, but not bad either, and the conditions of play were often less so. Teams had to play a lot of exhibitions to pay the bills, and sometimes played three games in a day; many franchises were on fragile financial ground. But players could make a living, the Negro Leagues became an important component of African American life, and the players had high status. Over time, the league did find a degree of stability; its best year was probably 1946.
After Robinson’s debut, white baseball skimmed off the best talent—often with limited or no compensation. The Negro Leagues could not survive. And with the end of the Negro Leagues came the end to many things: black coaches and managers; black vendors; black suppliers; black promoters, marketers, and accountants.
For his first two years in the major leagues, Robinson had turned the other cheek to abuse, at Rickey’s urging. In 1949, his third year, he began to showcase his outspoken and combative nature. Not everyone liked what he had to say. After Rickey left the Dodgers in 1950, Robinson’s relations with the team’s management grew testy and then toxic. It didn’t help that he suffered the blow that comes to all athletes: age. After the 1956 season, the Dodgers announced that they had traded Robinson to their detested rival, the New York Giants, for the baseball equivalent of a ham sandwich. Robinson resigned instead. Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, he paid tribute in his speech to his wife, his mother—and Branch Rickey,20 but not to the Dodgers, whom he never worked for again after he turned in his uniform. He had moved on to a career in business and a crusade of civil rights activism.
In 1972, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his debut, a new generation of Dodger ownership sought to heal the breach. Robinson traveled to Los Angeles for a ceremony that retired his number. He also threw out the first pitch at that year’s World Series—and publicly rebuked the game for the lack of black coaches and managers. He died a few weeks later of a combination of diabetes and heart disease. Six athletes served as pallbearers: five fellow Dodgers, both black and white, and Bill Russell of the Celtics (see the 1962 entry). He was buried a few blocks from Ebbets Field.21
Jackie Robinson was an exceptional man, and his story is exceptional. It is the one clear instance in which sport did not just reflect society but helped to change it. When he died at age 53, he was eulogized as a great American, and the accolades have kept coming. In 1984 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. In 1997 major league baseball retired his number, 42, from all teams. The ballpark for the New York Mets, an homage to Ebbets Field that opened in 2009, features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.
Robinson earned every bit of these honors. But to the end of his days, his sense of anger and injustice burned deep. He would always feel a place apart in his own country because, he wrote, he was “a black man in a white world.”22
1949
ORIGINAL ICE-RESURFACING MACHINE
A
fter a Great Depression and a world war, Americans were ready to have some fun. Postwar innovators delivered, with new or improved products that made it easier, and cheaper, for people to play.
The first commercial ski lift, for example, debuted in Sun Valley in 1936,1 when a railroad engineer working at the resort adapted a technology he had seen at work on banana plantations.2 After the war, the first double-chair went to work, and by the 1950s, chairlifts were ubiquitous, allowing operators to move more people up the mountain than the primitive rope tows ever could.
In bowling, the pinsetter went through a similar evolution. Before the war, a bowler and engineer named Gottfried Schmidt, with the help of a few friends, had built a crude prototype in a turkey coop.3 Schmitt continued to work on his invention when he joined AMF—still an important name in bowling—but the firm took a break for war duty and didn’t produce one it was ready to show the public until 1946.4 A two-ton behemoth, it proved unreliable and never reached the market. By 1952, after many more trials and errors, the first recognizably modern and efficient pinsetter was hard at work.5
Without needing to wait for humans to set pins, games went faster and more pleasantly. That was better for bowlers and also improved the economics of running an alley. Both factors were critical to the bowling boom of the 1950s; by the end of the decade, 10 million people a week were bowling, and 9 out of 10 alleys were using automatic pinsetters.6 Of course the boom turned into a bubble, which burst, but that is a different story.
Another postwar innovation was the golf cart. There were a few efforts putt-putting around in the 1930s, but these went nowhere commercially. Things changed in the early 1950s when reliable and quiet versions entered the market. Initially, these served a specific need, helping the old or injured; at some courses, a physicians’ note was required to rent one.7 That changed quickly when course operators realized that carts made for faster games. That meant more golfers on the course, and more greens fees, as well as new revenues in the form of rentals. Now about two-thirds of all rounds use a cart.
Then there is the eponymous Zamboni® ice-resurfacing machine—another tale of persistence and ingenuity. Beginning in the 1920s, brothers Frank and Lorenzo Zamboni made a nice living producing block ice for the food industry. But as refrigeration improved, the ice market melted away. So in 1940 they opened a skating rink, the Paramount Iceland, about a dozen miles from Los Angeles.8 Maintaining a quality surface was almost impossible. Resurfacing was expensive and time-consuming, requiring several workers to shave the ice, haul the scrapings away, squeegee the surface, and then spray water and wait for it to freeze. Skaters either moved through sludge on bad ice, or waited. And waited. The process took about 90 minutes.
Frank Zamboni, who never graduated from high school but was an inspired tinkerer—he got his first patent, for an electrical resister, in 1928—figured there had to be a better way. Beginning in 1942, he experimented with idea after idea, using different configurations of water, heat, chassis, storage, and engines.
In 1949, he cracked the code.9 This was the Model A (pictured below). Built on a Jeep platform, a wooden box held the snow shavings; water dropped from a tank to wash the ice and was pumped back into the bucket. Then another layer of water was laid down for a fresh, clean surface. The vehicle looked ungainly, but it worked, resurfacing the rink with a clean sheet in 15 minutes.10
Restored by the company in 1998,11 the Model A still works, though it mostly enjoys a well-deserved retirement at the Paramount rink. The second Zamboni® machine, the Model B, was created in 1950, at the request of figure skater Sonja Henie, who saw the Model A and had to have one for herself. The machine earned a patent in 1953 and began its long, if lumbering, march across American ice. A Zamboni® machine was first used in an NHL game in 1954, and one scraped the ice at the Olympics for the first time at Squaw Valley in 1960.
Growth was slow at first; only 32 machines were built through 1956. As with the other inventions, though, there emerged a symbiosis between the product—good, clean ice—and the times, as many municipalities and schools began to build rinks. More than 10,000 have been sold.
But the Zamboni® ice-resurfacer is more than another example of ingenuity. It is a cultural touchstone. There is the rock song, “I Want to Drive the Zamboni®,” by the Gear Daddies, and the machine has been featured in television shows ranging from CSI to David Letterman. There are license plate frames that read, “My other car is a Zamboni®,” and a Zamboni® token in a hockey-themed version of Monopoly.12 The late Charles Schultz, an avid hockey player, had two of them at his home rink, and the machines made several appearances in his Peanuts comic strip.13 Snoopy drove one. Charlie Brown, as usual, got it exactly right when he mused: “There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni® clearing the ice.”14
1952
TIGERBELLE MAE FAGGS’S SHOES FROM THE HELSINKI OLYMPICS
A
t its height, the women’s track team at Tennessee State University1 may have been the most dominant athletic program in history, winning 12 straight national titles in the 1950s and 1960s. The secret to TSU’s success was simple: it was one of the few colleges where black women could get both a solid education and real coaching.
Not that it was easy. When Coach Ed Temple was hired in 1950, he recalled, the program consisted of “a partial track ending at a dump, no budget to speak of, three or four fellows, and two girls.”2 At the time, amateur clubs provided opportunities for some women athletes to compete, but few were based in the South. On the collegiate level, Tuskegee was the power at the time, winning 11 national titles between 1937 and 1948.3 Alice Coachman, the “Tuskegee Flash,” was the biggest star. She dominated US track for a decade and was the first African American woman to win Olympic gold, in the high jump in the 1948 Olympics.
But the TSU Tigerbelles were about to push the Tuskegee Tigerettes into second place. In 1952 Temple recruited a talented New Yorker, Mae Faggs, who had competed in the 1948 Olympics as a 16-year-old. Faggs would become the first American woman to compete in three Olympics. She wore these shoes in Helsinki.
Segregated Tennessee was a shock to Faggs, a New Yorker: “I was almost struck dumb by the situation in the South,” she recalled.4 But she stuck it out, in part because of her admiration for Temple, and in part because she was able to get work-study financial aid. Coach Temple was TSU track’s undisputed leader—benign dictator might be the better description—but Faggs was an enduring influence, known as “the mother of the Tigerbelles.”5
The Tigerbelles won their first Olympic gold in 1952, with Faggs and Barbara Jones comprising half the 4 x 100-meter relay team. That was the beginning of a remarkable run. Between 1952 and 1984, 40 Tigerbelles competed in the Olympics (35 of them for the United States), earning 27 Olympic medals, 15 of them gold.6 The Tigerbelles also succeeded off the track. Thirty-nine of the Olympians graduated from TSU, and the other earned her degree elsewhere;7 28 got advanced degrees.8 Sprinter Wyomia Tyus was 15 when she first met Temple and some of the athletes at the summer clinic he ran. “To me, the Tigerbelles were everything that I could see a woman should be,” she said. “It was not only that they were great athletes, but they were also women that were doing something to make careers for themselves when they were told, ‘No.’”9
Seven Tigerbelles made the 1960 US track team. Temple was the coach. (He made headlines by issuing a no-dancing edict that the Italian press found highly amusing.) And Wilma Rudolph was the star. The twentieth of 22 children, Rudolph was raised without electricity or indoor plumbing. Enduring polio, pneumonia, measles, whooping cough, and numerous other childhood illnesses, she wore leg braces until she was 12.10 No one could have predicted that she would become one of the most powerful, and elegant, sprinters in history.11
Rudolph had competed in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics as a fast but raw 16-year-old, running the third leg on the bronze-medal-winning relay team. (Faggs, whom Rudolph revered as a mentor and second coach, led off.12) In Rome, Rudolph was a well-trained athlete in her prime. With an ease that belied the years of hard work, Rudolph won the 100- and 200-meter races. “The sensuality of her sprinting was in that stride,” wrote a British track journalist. “Those legs running seemed to induce hydraulic elevation.”13
Her favorite event, however, was the 4 x 100-meter relay; all four runners were Tigerbelles. They broke the world record in a heat, then won the gold in heart-stopping fashion, with Rudolph coming from behind after almost dropping the baton. “My relay medal meant the most to me,” Rudolph later said. “I won it with my college teammates, for my coach.” An unknown before the games, Rudolph’s three gold medals—a record haul for an American woman—made her the belle of the Olympics. She was much more sought after than the gold-medal boxer, Cassius Clay, who desperately sought the attention Rudolph attracted without even trying.14
When her hometown, Clarksville, Tennessee, wanted to honor Rudolph, she agreed, on one condition: the celebrations could not be segregated. It was the first integrated parade in the town’s history.15 Two years later, she retired from competition. But the Tigerbelles kept rolling.
In 1964 Wyomia Tyus and Edie McGuire, fellow Tigerbelles (and high school teammates), went 1–2 in the 100 meters. McGuire won the 200 in world record time, and two Tigerbelles won silver in the 400-meter relay. In 1968, six Tigerbelles ran for the United States, and one more for Jamaica. Tyus became the first sprinter (of either sex) to repeat as 100-meter champion. Tigerbelle Madeline Manning became the first American woman to win the 800 meters.
The Tigerbelle record was astonishing, but their achievements barely registered, even on campus. Football was king at TSU. The track, located between a cow pasture and a pigpen, was an abbreviated dirt oval; sometimes the athletes lined it themselves. And yes, it smelled. “You ought to be down here when the temperature is 105,” Temple said in 1960. “Between the rocks on the track and the pigs, let me tell you, it is rough around here.”16 He regularly had to get out a shovel and clear the cow patties. After complaining to the governor, the team got its first scholarships in 1967; it didn’t have a complete track until 1978, after a Nashville newspaper featured photos of the giant potholes that pockmarked the old one. As Temple quipped, “Talk about Title IX? Shoot, we started at Title I.”17 (See 1972 entry on Immaculata.) The indifference was hardly unique to TSU, whose record was better than most; after all, it did at least field a women’s team. In 1958 the US track coach, George Eastment, estimated that fewer than 200 American women were seriously training in track-and-field.18
The irony is that the Tigerbelles got a track worthy of their talents just as their glorious run was ending. Though TSU sent several athletes to the 1972 and 1976 Olympics, and the team was nationally competitive into the early 1980s, the writing was on the wall. After being ignored and ridiculed for decades, women athletes of all races were being wooed by larger, richer schools, thanks to Title IX. The last Tigerbelle to win Olympic gold was Chandra Cheeseborough in 1984; she is now the coach at TSU.
In a sense, TSU’s relative decline can be seen as good news. Thanks to positive social changes in regard to both African Americans and women, by the 1970s TSU was no longer the only game in town for gifted black female athletes. They had more choices, and they exercised them.
Consider Evelyn Ashford, the premier American sprinter of the 1980s. She would have been a natural for the Tigerbelles, and Temple tried to recruit her,19 but in 1976 she accepted one of the first female athletic scholarships to UCLA. The university was close to home and offered training, travel, equipment, and facilities far superior to those of TSU. In 16 years of competing at a world-class level, Ashford qualified for five Olympics. She won four golds and one silver medal; she was also chosen to be the flag-bearer for the American team at the 1988 Games in Seoul. Jackie Joyner-Kersee (see the 1993 entry on her), who considered Wilma Rudolph her role model,20 also went to UCLA, and won six medals in four Olympics. These are not the kinds of careers even the greatest Tigerbelles could have imagined. But they helped to make them possible.
1952
MAGAZINE COVER FEATURING TOMMY KONO
O
ne of the redeeming qualities of sports is that they can offer structure and even purpose. Think of the child with indifferent parents who finds a mentor in a coach. Or the teenager who stays away from trouble to stay on the team. Or the people who train for charity runs in honor of a loved one.
Or think of Tamio “Tommy” Kono, sent to the Tule Lake internment camp in northern California as a 12-year-old for the crime of being a Japanese American during World War II. Ironically, the camp was actually good for his health; the dry desert air helped his asthma. And when a neighbor showed him how to use barbells and dumbbells,1 the boy took to it. Though his parents were concerned the activity was too strenuous,2 he worked out in secret and developed new muscle—and confidence.3
Among others who were interned at Tule Lake were Pat Morita, the star of the Karate Kid films; George Takei of Star Trek fame; Bob Matsui, who would serve 13 terms in Congress; and Emerick Ishikawa, a well-known weightlifter who would compete for the United States in the London Olympics in 1948, finishing sixth. Kono regarded Ishikawa with awe. The older man’s weights, he recalled, “looked like train wheels to me.”4 But Kono’s career would far eclipse that of his boyhood hero; for a time, he was the biggest star in his sport.
Released after the war, Kono’s family settled in Sacramento, where he finished high school—and kept lifting. He began training seriously in the late 1940s. By 1952 he was on the army weightlifting team and ready to compete internationally.
More than ready; Kono didn’t lose for the next eight years. That included two Olympic gold medals, one at Helsinki in 1952 (competing at 67.5 kilograms) and the other in Melbourne in 1956 (competing at 82.5 kilograms). He also won the world championships every year from 1953 to 1959. He slumped to a silver in Rome in 1960 (competing at 75 kilograms), and medaled in two more world championships (bronze in 1961, silver in 1962). Over this period, he set 26 world records in four different weight classes;5 the latter is an achievement no one has matched. In 2005, the International Weightlifting Federation named him the greatest lifter of the previous 100 years.6
While weightlifting has never been a sport that attracts much attention, Kono’s excellence could not be overlooked. Not only did he routinely make the magazine covers of the sport’s press, such as in the photo on the previous page, he was also an eight-time finalist for the Sullivan Award, given to the nation’s best amateur athlete, finishing second four times—behind shot-putter/discus thrower Parry O’Brien in 1959, sprinter Wilma Rudolph in 1961, miler Jim Beatty in 1962, and pole-vaulter John Pennel in 1963.7 He also had a successful career as a bodybuilder, winning the Mr. Universe title in 1955, 1957, and 1961.
After retiring from competition in 1964, Kono became a coach, working with the Mexican, West German, and American men’s teams, as well as with the first US women’s weight-lifting teams in the late 1980s. He published several books on weight lifting and designed weight-lifting equipment, such as knee and waist bands. Unfortunately, Kono saw US performance decline over this period; no American man has won an Olympic medal in the sport since 1988, and only one woman has done so.
Kono sometimes wore glasses when he competed, and he was highly regarded for his humane approach to the sport and generosity with young lifters. But in the heat of competition, he was an intimidating presence. When he “looks at me from the wings,” said a Soviet rival, “it works on me like a python on a rabbit.”8
TOWEL THROWN INTO THE RING AT THE FIGHT BETWEEN JOE LOUIS AND MAX SCHMELING
O
n the night of June 22, 1938, something unprecedented happened. Sixty million Americans sat by their radios and rooted for a black man to triumph. He did, in 124 seconds of savagely beautiful boxing.
In one corner was America’s Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion; in the other was Germany’s Max Schmeling, the only man who had ever beaten Louis as a pro. This was more than a fight. It was truth, justice, and the American way against a Nazi regime of unmistakable viciousness. “Joe,” President Roosevelt had told Louis a few weeks before, “we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.”1 Louis himself recognized the heavy symbolism of the occasion. “I knew I had to get Schmeling good,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The whole damned country was depending on me.” He also appreciated the irony of the moment, noting that he had solid support even in regions that were lynching fellow African Americans.2
Two years earlier, in a shocking upset, Schmeling had knocked Louis down in the fourth and out in the twelfth. To many Americans, the fact that Schmeling was white meant more than that he was foreign, and they were happy that Louis had lost. At news of Louis’s defeat, there was cheering in the House of Representatives.3
By 1938, however, as the news out of Germany had become progressively darker, opinions had changed. Now this was not just Louis versus Schmeling, but democracy versus fascism. Black Americans in particular were absorbed with every detail. To many, Louis was hope in boxing gloves, an inspiration and possibly a promise of better days ahead. “As a kid, Joe Louis was everything,” recalled Charles Rangel, the longtime US Congressman from Harlem. “He just was the epitome of racial pride.”4 No previous event had ever so consumed black America. America as a whole was only slightly less engaged and was largely united behind Louis.
Germany, of course, was solidly behind Schmeling. Although never a member of the Nazi Party, his victory over Louis in 1936 had made him a national icon of Aryan superiority. As many as 100 million people tuned in on radio worldwide, making the rematch the biggest sporting event in history to that date.
Shortly after 10:00 pm the opening bell rang, and Louis all but sprinted across the ring to attack. A few seconds later, he landed a solid left jab, and then a few more. A right to the jaw staggered the German. Clinging to the ropes, Schmeling absorbed punch after punch. At about 1:20 into the fight, Louis unloaded. Schmeling hung onto the rope with one glove; his body was open, and Louis drove his fists in again and again, alternating with blows to the head. A thudding right to the jaw dropped Schmeling. Brave but dazed, Schmeling rose off the mat at the count of two—to be met by another flurry of blows he could not defend against. He stumbled but didn’t quite go down. Louis backed off briefly, then went at his almost defenseless opponent, raining blows at will, climaxed by a crushing right to the jaw. Schmeling went down again, and this time would not get up. His handlers threw in this towel just two minutes and four seconds into the fight.5
Black America was beyond thrilled. “The black race is supreme tonight,” read a banner in Harlem.6 Poet Maya Angelou, then a 10-year-old girl, remembered listening to the fight in her grandmother’s Arkansas store: “Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother’s son. He was the strongest man in the world.”7
When America entered World War II, Louis donated several substantial purses to war-related funds—then he joined the army. “There’s a lot wrong with America, but nothin’ Hitler could fix,” he explained his decision to enlist.8 Assigned to a segregated unit, he offered boxing exhibitions to boost morale, but with one stipulation: the audience must be integrated. He also used his influence to help African American soldiers apply to officer candidate school. (Among them was Jackie Robinson; see 1947 entry.) By the end of the war, Louis was regarded by both blacks and whites as an American hero.
Time and lack of real competition had eroded his boxing skills, but persistent tax troubles kept Louis in the ring. In October 1951, after a young Rocky Marciano knocked him through the ropes, he called it quits. Louis retired with a record of 66–3, with 52 of the victories by knockout. He holds the record for the longest reign as champion—11 years and 10 months—and the most title defenses (25).
His larger achievement was a more subtle one. Louis was the first black man to be widely accepted by American society. That was a complicated matter. The previous black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, had positively reveled in irritating white America, with his gold teeth and white women. Promoters used Johnson’s controversial reign as an excuse to keep blacks out of the highest ranks of boxing.
Louis’s first fight, then, was to get a chance not only to fight, but to fight honestly. He tread cautiously. His managers advised him never to smile when he beat a white boxer and never to be seen with a white woman; they also groomed his table manners and coached him on how to speak in public. While Louis could turn a memorable phrase—“he can run but he can’t hide” is one of them—his public utterances were cautious to the point of banality. To some members of a later generation of black athletes, such discretion would be regarded with contempt; Muhammad Ali (see the 1975 entry on the Thrilla in Manila) called him an “Uncle Tom.”9
That is unfair. Louis showed what black Americans could achieve, given the chance. His success helped prepare the way for the general integration of sports and also allowed him to negotiate, and expand, the treacherous public space open to black Americans. When the black Jack Johnson beat the white Jim Jeffries in 1910, it touched off white-on-black violence all over the country10 that left 19 dead and 249 injured.11 When Louis beat Schmeling, most of the country celebrated with him. “White Americans,” concluded historian Gerald Early, “accepted Joe Louis as a sort of emblem of the US, an emblem of American democracy.”12 That had never happened before.
While Louis’s later years were deeply sad, punctuated by money, health, and marital troubles, they should not obscure his greatness as an athlete and the depth of his legacy as an American. Joe Louis, said author Richard Wright, “was the concentrated essence of black triumph over white.”13 At the end, the country that had humiliated and hounded him finally offered him the respect he deserved: Louis was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
1943–1954
HANDBOOK FROM THE ALL-AMERICAN GIRLS PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUE
I
n the first half of the twentieth century, baseball was the undisputed national pastime for women as well as men. There were industrial softball leagues and tournaments and national organizations. By the early 1940s there were tens of thousands of women’s softball teams.1
During World War II this pool of talent found a new outlet. The need for military manpower hurt professional baseball; dozens of minor league teams closed down, and major league rosters were filled with near-middle-aged has-beens and never-wases. With factories hiring Rosie the Riveters to fill in for male factory workers, Cubs owner Philip Wrigley saw an opportunity for something similar: an all-women professional baseball league in case the majors had to be shut down. Scouts recruited from the extensive softball network, and in 1943 a four-team league debuted: the Kenosha Comets, the Racine Belles, the Rockford Peaches, and the South Bend Blue Sox.
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), as it became known, lasted 12 seasons, under three different ownerships. It eventually expanded to as many as 10 teams, all in the Midwest. That’s a pretty good run for a women’s team sport; many an effort since has gone under much faster. Salaries were not startling—$60 to $85 a week at first—but well above that of most munitions workers.2 The managers were men, including a number of former major leaguers, such as Bill Wambsganss, who turned the only unassisted triple play in World Series history in 1920, and Hall of Famer Jimmy Foxx.3
At first the women played softball, but the game evolved; it’s best to see the sport the women played as a hybrid between softball and baseball that got closer to the latter over time. By 1948 they were pitching overhand, using a hardball. The women showcased an energetic brand of baseball, running wild on the base-paths and sliding head-first, on account of their uniforms—a one-piece dress, cut four inches above the knees.
At a time when many physical educators of both sexes thought that competition coarsened girls, the league’s management placed an emphasis on femininity. Players took mandatory etiquette lessons and had to follow strict rules of conduct. The handbook pictured below, created by the league, gave advice on everything from speech (“no slang or slurry words”)4 to beauty routines and hygiene (shower after games and dry thoroughly) to sportsmanship and stretching. “You have certain responsibilities,” the guide noted, because you “are in the limelight.”5
On-field makeup was compulsory; one player recalled that a chaperone held her back from going to the plate in a tense situation until she refreshed her lipstick.6 The team chaperone had to approve all social engagements.7 In each town, there was a list of places not to go.8
All of this sounds both curious and condescending, but it was a calculated choice to make these athletes less threatening to the social mores they were so enthusiastically flouting. For these jocks, if the price of playing for real was makeup lessons and stupid rules, so be it.9 And drawing on talent from all over the country, Canada, and even Cuba—but no African Americans, even after Jackie Robinson had debuted10—the AAGPBL teams gave a chance to some 545 athletes.11 Wally Pipp, the man Lou Gehrig displaced at first base, called Dottie Kamenshek of the Rockford Peaches the “fanciest-fielding first baseman I’ve ever seen, male or female.”12
Although the AAGPBL was a wartime innovation, the league hit its peak after the fighting was over, attracting nearly a million fans in 1948.13 By the early 1950s, though, it was declining. Baseball was back, football was on the rise, and television was providing a different form of family entertainment. The league was also not managed as well as it had been under Wrigley and his successor. Spending on promotion and publicity plummeted, and so did attendance. The league died with a whimper in 1954.
But it had a very American resurrection, courtesy of Hollywood. In 1988 the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its “Women in Baseball” exhibit, and dozens of league alumni attended. So did filmmaker Penny Marshall.14 Four years later, Marshall released one of the few great baseball movies, A League of Their Own, about the AAGPBL during World War II. The film is not historically precise, and too many of the actors throw like girls; they would never have made the cut. But it captures the spirit of the enterprise, and the players, forgotten for decades, became hometown celebrities.
The movie also added a phrase to the game’s rich lexicon of clichés when the manager, played by Tom Hanks, barked at one of his players: “There’s no crying in baseball.” Of course there is. The players of the AAGPBL knew that as well as anyone. But to a woman, they also recalled their years as professional ballplayers as among the most joyous times of their lives.
1945
10TH MOUNTAIN DIVISION PARKA
T
he story of America’s most famous ski troops begins in Finland. During the Winter War of 1939–1940, the tiny country of fewer than four million people used its expertise in the snow to inflict more than 300,000 casualties on the Soviet invaders. The Finns could never win, but it took almost four months to subdue them; their unexpectedly effective resistance showed the potential of unconventional warfare on skis.1 An American named Charles Minot Dole, founder of the National Ski Patrol, took note. He argued that such a unit could also be useful to the US military. Army leaders were dubious, but a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, the War Department decided it was worth a try. That was the beginning of what became the 10th Mountain Division.2
The 10th had a number of great athletes in it, including Norwegian-born world ski-jumping champion Torger Tokle; Swiss championship downhiller Walter Prager; Austrian-born Toni Matt, who won two US downhill titles; and US Olympic field hockey player Bill Boddington. As those names suggest, the 10th was remarkably international; it was also conspicuously well educated. Skiing, at the time, was an elite sport embedded most prominently in eastern colleges; Dartmouth alone sent dozens of men. There were also lumberjacks, cowboys, ranchers, and outdoorsmen of all kinds. What drew them together was their love of the mountains. The division’s weekly newspaper, The Blizzard, featured pinups of slopes, not women.3 On leave, many would head to the hills, not the saloon. Those who did the latter were known to rappel down hotel walls for the heck of it. The 10th had style.
The romance of the “ski commandos” was irresistible. They got a spread in Life and the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Warner Brothers released what can only be called a Technicolor panegyric, Mountain Fighters. “And what men they are!” the narrator gushed. “There they go, the hard-hitting mountain troopers, the daredevils of the heights. They conquer mountains and men that liberty might live forever as they fight on to victory!” Fade to flag.4
In military terms, however, the 10th was a puzzle. The first officers knew a lot about the military but next to nothing about skiing or mountaineering; their men knew a lot about the outdoors and next to nothing about the military. The turning point was the establishment of a dedicated training center in late 1942, 9,250 feet above sea level, in Pando, Colorado, about 114 miles west of Denver. There, at Camp Hale, the three regiments that made up the division—the 85th, 86th, and 87th—trained for the better part of two years, in skiing, rock-climbing, winter survival, and mountain rescue and combat. Gradually, men and officers refined their equipment, including the first snowmobiles and snowcats.5
But when American troops hit the beaches of France on D-Day, Hollywood’s hard-hitting daredevils stayed in Colorado. No one quite knew what to do with them. Their firepower was light, and there was some skepticism about a division that was just so . . . different. In June 1944, much to the 10th’s dismay, they were relocated to the snakes, scorpions, and sweltering weather of Camp Swift in Texas.
Later that year they got their chance. Although Rome had surrendered to the Allies in 1943, Germany still held large chunks of northern Italy. The Nazis’ “Winter Line” stretched east to west, just below the top of the Italian boot, including a strong position on the tops of a series of ridges that were part of the Apennine Mountains. These blocked access to the Po valley and the route to Bologna and on through to Austria and southern Germany. Four times the Fifth Army tried to dislodge them; four times it was beaten back.6 Perhaps, the thinking went, this was a job for trained mountain troops.
The 10th got into position in January 1945 and sent out patrols, sometimes on their white-painted skis, to explore their surroundings—the only times the ski equipment saw use in Italy.7 On these missions, the troops would wear parkas like the one opposite; one side was snow white, the other olive, adaptable for use in different kinds of terrain.
As the patrols scouted the area, they determined that the key to breaking through the Winter Line was a series of peaks that became known as Riva Ridge. These overlooked the approaches to Mount Belvedere, which protected the road to Bologna. If the Allies could take Riva Ridge, they could move on to Mount Belvedere, but not vice versa—something the Fifth Army had learned at great human cost.
There was just one problem: getting up Riva Ridge. The Germans had fortified their positions with mines, barbed wire, and bunkers. Night after night, the men of the 10th probed and explored. Eventually, they mapped five routes up the lightly defended eastern face. Variously steep and muddy or steep and icy, the Germans considered it unclimbable.
The plan was simple. Climb 1,500 feet up the eastern face, in force, at night. Then surprise the Germans, establish a position, and hold it. At 7:30 on the evening of February 18, eight hundred men of the 86th regiment stalked silently up. They even unloaded their weapons lest an errant shot betray their positions. None of the trails required advanced mountaineering skills, but two of them were tricky enough to require ropes, which had been hammered into the rock a few days before. Negotiating even the easier terrain with full packs was a feat of conditioning that might have overwhelmed soldiers who lacked the 10th’s training.
If a single German had looked over the ridge, the men could have been picked off easily. But no one looked, and no dogs were on patrol. A providential fog descended. This made climbing more difficult, but much safer. Before dawn broke on February 19, everyone had reached the summit.
There the men of the 10th loaded their weapons, set up communications, and prepared for battle. Surprised but determined, the Germans counterattacked all along the crest of Riva Ridge. The 10th held them off. Supplies came up and the wounded went down via mules, men, and an ingenious portable tram.8 Allied forces also moved into Mount Belvedere. Less than a week after the 10th’s climb up Riva Ridge, the Germans fell back.
Over the next three months the 10th, supported by other American forces, as well as allies from Brazil, Italy, New Zealand, and Poland, chased the Germans off Belvedere, then across the Po valley, then over Lake Garda. In one case, the 10th advanced so fast that when they stumbled across the headquarters of the German 90th Panzer division, there was a fresh slice of bread and jam left on the table, with one bite gone.9 Allied forces were in sight of Austria when the German armies in Italy surrendered on May 2, six days before V-E Day. The 10th spent the following months enjoying themselves in the Alps. They were home by August.
The climb up Riva Ridge was the signature moment for the 10th—the only time the men had to use their special skills. But without that ascent, nothing else they did would have been possible. During its 114 days in combat, the 10th was credited with neutralizing five German divisions. It paid a heavy price: 975 dead and 3,871 wounded.10
Though it was part of the last division to enter the war, the 10th fought with an improvisational flair characteristic of more seasoned troops, never losing a battle. In his journal, the German general who surrendered to them called the 10th his “most dangerous opponent.”11
After the war, the story of the 10th continued to exert a hold. These troops were an especially interesting bunch. Two of the sons of the Trapp Family Singers fought with the 10th; so did Morley Nelson, who brought his goshawk with him to Camp Hale and then became Hollywood’s in-house falconer.12 Bill Bowerman went on to coach track at Oregon and cofound Nike (see the 1974 entry on the Waffle Trainer and the 1975 entry on Steve Prefontaine). Don Coryell was a National Football League head coach, leading the “Air Coryell” teams of the San Diego Chargers.13 Bob Dole, who came to the 10th as a wartime replacement, lost a kidney and the use of his right arm leading a patrol; he later was a US Senator from Kansas and the Republican presidential candidate in 1996.
Appropriately, the greatest postwar influence of the 10th was a collective one: the veterans helped to create the modern American ski industry. Five members were on the 1948 US Olympic ski team and a sixth was its coach. Members of the 10th founded almost two dozen ski areas, including Snow Valley in California; Arapahoe Basin, Aspen, Steamboat Springs, and Vail14 in Colorado; Waterville Valley (New Hampshire); Mount Bachelor (Oregon); and Sugarbush and Pico (Vermont). They managed or ran ski schools in dozens more; they made ski films, designed equipment, and organized competitions. Veterans of the 10th founded Skiing magazine. Don Goodman invented one of the first safety bindings.15 Monty Atwater became an expert in avalanche control. Jim Winthers began ski programs for the disabled. Robert Heron, the civilian engineer who designed the portable tram used to ferry supplies up Riva Ridge, designed generations of chairlifts.16 “We wanted to teach the country to ski,” said veteran Dick Wilson. “And we did.”17
1947
JACKIE ROBINSON’S JERSEY
T
his jersey is made of flannel, redolent of sweat—and full of stories.
One story is about 60 years of segregation. When Jackie Robinson donned a Dodgers jersey and took the field at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, he was the first black man to appear in a major league game since 1887.
A second story is about social change. Martin Luther King Jr. would say that Robinson was “a pilgrim that walked in the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”1
A third story is that of a man. Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born to a sharecropping family in south Georgia; his mother moved her five children to Pasadena, California, when he was an infant.2 After excelling in sports in high school, Robinson went on to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was the first student to letter in four sports.3 After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he joined the military and was eventually sent to officer candidate school (see the 1938 entry on Joe Louis). In Fort Hood, Texas, he had his own Rosa Parks moment, 11 years before her challenge to segregation, when he refused to move to the back of the bus while traveling to base in 1944. Acquitted after a court-martial, he left the army (or perhaps vice versa) and joined the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues.
At the same time that Robinson was playing second base for the Monarchs, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, was thinking about how to bring African Americans into the major leagues. In this he had the quiet support of the baseball commissioner, Happy Chandler, who noted that if blacks could die for their country in combat overseas, “they can play ball in America.”4 But Rickey also faced the quiet opposition of the 15 other major league clubs.5
An innovator who had pioneered the modern farm system and the use of statistical analysis, Rickey was both idealistic and shrewd. He genuinely felt it was long past time that black Americans be part of the national pastime; a devout Methodist, he refused to play baseball on Sunday during his conspicuously inglorious major league career (120 games over four years, with a career .239 batting average).
Rickey also knew there was a wealth of black talent that could improve his team and draw black fans to Dodgers’ games. And he knew it had to be done carefully. Before taking any action, he sought the advice of black leaders about what kind of player to recruit and how to manage the transition.6 To provide cover as he evaluated the talent, he floated the possibility of starting a new Negro League. Reports began to come back about an infielder named Robinson. Rickey sent his favorite scout, Clyde Sukeforth, to check him out.
In Jimmy Breslin’s happy phrase, Sukeforth “could go out for coffee and come back with a second baseman.”7 He was a shrewd judge of character as well as skills, and he liked what he saw and heard of Robinson. In August 1945 Rickey called Robinson in for a chat: “You were brought here, Jack Robinson, to play for the Brooklyn organization.”8 In October 1945, to no fanfare, Robinson signed a Brooklyn Dodgers contract. He spent the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, where he was spectacular, and made the big team out of spring training in Havana the following year. “My purpose,” said Rickey on the announcement of the signing, “is to be fair to all people, and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.”9
Even in retrospect, it is difficult to imagine a better choice to play the role of pioneer than the 28-year-old Jackie Robinson. With his college and military background, whites could not patronize him (though some tried). With his reputation for challenging racism, earned in both the military and the Negro Leagues, blacks respected him. With a loving and tough-minded wife, Rachel, he had a solid emotional foundation. And his own athletic abilities and strength of character allowed him to excel even as he faced vicious abuse.
While the white press certainly noticed the moment, the black press had a surer appreciation of its importance. For example, the edition of New York’s Amsterdam News that came out after his debut featured no fewer than 14 articles on Robinson,10 covering everything from his play (good) to how people should behave (no “loud and uncouth jokes”). Columnist Earl Brown was ahead of the game when he predicted that “Rickey will be remembered by posterity more for breaking the color bar in the big leagues than he will for any of the many other epochal things he has done in baseball.”11
It’s worth remembering, too, just how good a player Robinson was. Under extraordinary pressure, he had a career batting average of .311 and an on-base percentage of .409; he won the Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949. He was a dynamic base-runner who helped move the game away from its station-to-station lethargy. Most important, he was a competitor, who would steal home or lay down a bunt or break up a double-play to win a game. “He came to beat you,” said manager Leo Durocher. “He came to stuff the damn bat right up your ass.”12 Bill James, the baseball historian and statistical genius, ranked Robinson the 32nd best player ever.13
And Robinson did all this under a kind of pressure no other player has ever faced—from vicious bench-jockeying to isolation from his teammates14 to the extraordinary expectations of other black Americans. Infielder Ed Charles, who would have a solid major league career from 1962 to 1969, remembered how as a boy, he and his friends followed Robinson to the train station after watching him play in Florida: “When the train pulled out, we ran down the tracks listening for the sounds as far as we could. And when we couldn’t hear it any longer, we stopped and put our ears to the track so we could feel the vibrations of that train carrying Jackie Robinson.”15 Hank Aaron put it simply, “He gave us hope; he was the Dr. King of baseball.”16
Robinson was the first black American to excel in a white-dominated pro team sport. Previous African American stars, such as Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, had made their names in individual sports. Being part of a team, with all the implications of physical proximity and mutual dependence—that was different. Robinson’s success, playing side by side with white teammates, proved that he was equal to the moment. And it didn’t take long before his skills and character earned the Dodgers’ respect. When Philadelphia players were particularly abusive to him about six weeks into the 1947 season, other Dodgers rallied to Robinson’s defense. By 1949 Robinson would say that “racial tensions had almost completely dissipated” on the team.17 He and other black Dodgers, such as Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, would play key roles in Brooklyn’s only championship in 1955.
All this raised an interesting question: If blacks could excel while competing with whites at the highest level of baseball, and also become acknowledged leaders in the clubhouse, what else might they be capable of? Historian Cornel West put it this way: “More even than either Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, or Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, Jackie Robinson graphically symbolized and personified the challenge to the vicious legacy and ideology of white supremacy in American history.”18
Baseball likes to pat itself on the back for integrating a year before the military and many years before other major institutions. To some extent, it deserves that pat. But remember, too, how slowly it went; in 1953 most teams still didn’t have a single black player, and in 1960 the American League had all of six.19 Moreover, the baseball establishment also proved remarkably myopic about how it went about integration. For almost two decades after his debut, Robinson and the black Americans who followed frequently could not stay at the same hotels as their teammates. Well into the 1960s, teams were sending talented young black players to get minor league experience in the South Atlantic League, an experience that embittered everyone it touched (see the 1974 entry on Hank Aaron). There was next to no progress for 40 years in terms of bringing blacks into the business or management sides of baseball.
This speaks to a larger issue. While the integration of the major leagues was an important and positive historical moment, no substantive change comes without losers. In this case, the loser was the Negro Leagues. Blacks had been playing baseball for as long as the game existed. Beginning in the early 1900s, they played exhibition games against white teams, and often beat them. These contests regularly disproved the lie, peddled for years by baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and others, that the reason there were no blacks in major league baseball was because none had proved good enough.
With the founding of the Negro National League in 1920, African American players had an organized outlet for their talents. The pay wasn’t great, but not bad either, and the conditions of play were often less so. Teams had to play a lot of exhibitions to pay the bills, and sometimes played three games in a day; many franchises were on fragile financial ground. But players could make a living, the Negro Leagues became an important component of African American life, and the players had high status. Over time, the league did find a degree of stability; its best year was probably 1946.
After Robinson’s debut, white baseball skimmed off the best talent—often with limited or no compensation. The Negro Leagues could not survive. And with the end of the Negro Leagues came the end to many things: black coaches and managers; black vendors; black suppliers; black promoters, marketers, and accountants.
For his first two years in the major leagues, Robinson had turned the other cheek to abuse, at Rickey’s urging. In 1949, his third year, he began to showcase his outspoken and combative nature. Not everyone liked what he had to say. After Rickey left the Dodgers in 1950, Robinson’s relations with the team’s management grew testy and then toxic. It didn’t help that he suffered the blow that comes to all athletes: age. After the 1956 season, the Dodgers announced that they had traded Robinson to their detested rival, the New York Giants, for the baseball equivalent of a ham sandwich. Robinson resigned instead. Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, he paid tribute in his speech to his wife, his mother—and Branch Rickey,20 but not to the Dodgers, whom he never worked for again after he turned in his uniform. He had moved on to a career in business and a crusade of civil rights activism.
In 1972, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his debut, a new generation of Dodger ownership sought to heal the breach. Robinson traveled to Los Angeles for a ceremony that retired his number. He also threw out the first pitch at that year’s World Series—and publicly rebuked the game for the lack of black coaches and managers. He died a few weeks later of a combination of diabetes and heart disease. Six athletes served as pallbearers: five fellow Dodgers, both black and white, and Bill Russell of the Celtics (see the 1962 entry). He was buried a few blocks from Ebbets Field.21
Jackie Robinson was an exceptional man, and his story is exceptional. It is the one clear instance in which sport did not just reflect society but helped to change it. When he died at age 53, he was eulogized as a great American, and the accolades have kept coming. In 1984 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. In 1997 major league baseball retired his number, 42, from all teams. The ballpark for the New York Mets, an homage to Ebbets Field that opened in 2009, features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.
Robinson earned every bit of these honors. But to the end of his days, his sense of anger and injustice burned deep. He would always feel a place apart in his own country because, he wrote, he was “a black man in a white world.”22
1949
ORIGINAL ICE-RESURFACING MACHINE
A
fter a Great Depression and a world war, Americans were ready to have some fun. Postwar innovators delivered, with new or improved products that made it easier, and cheaper, for people to play.
The first commercial ski lift, for example, debuted in Sun Valley in 1936,1 when a railroad engineer working at the resort adapted a technology he had seen at work on banana plantations.2 After the war, the first double-chair went to work, and by the 1950s, chairlifts were ubiquitous, allowing operators to move more people up the mountain than the primitive rope tows ever could.
In bowling, the pinsetter went through a similar evolution. Before the war, a bowler and engineer named Gottfried Schmidt, with the help of a few friends, had built a crude prototype in a turkey coop.3 Schmitt continued to work on his invention when he joined AMF—still an important name in bowling—but the firm took a break for war duty and didn’t produce one it was ready to show the public until 1946.4 A two-ton behemoth, it proved unreliable and never reached the market. By 1952, after many more trials and errors, the first recognizably modern and efficient pinsetter was hard at work.5
Without needing to wait for humans to set pins, games went faster and more pleasantly. That was better for bowlers and also improved the economics of running an alley. Both factors were critical to the bowling boom of the 1950s; by the end of the decade, 10 million people a week were bowling, and 9 out of 10 alleys were using automatic pinsetters.6 Of course the boom turned into a bubble, which burst, but that is a different story.
Another postwar innovation was the golf cart. There were a few efforts putt-putting around in the 1930s, but these went nowhere commercially. Things changed in the early 1950s when reliable and quiet versions entered the market. Initially, these served a specific need, helping the old or injured; at some courses, a physicians’ note was required to rent one.7 That changed quickly when course operators realized that carts made for faster games. That meant more golfers on the course, and more greens fees, as well as new revenues in the form of rentals. Now about two-thirds of all rounds use a cart.
Then there is the eponymous Zamboni® ice-resurfacing machine—another tale of persistence and ingenuity. Beginning in the 1920s, brothers Frank and Lorenzo Zamboni made a nice living producing block ice for the food industry. But as refrigeration improved, the ice market melted away. So in 1940 they opened a skating rink, the Paramount Iceland, about a dozen miles from Los Angeles.8 Maintaining a quality surface was almost impossible. Resurfacing was expensive and time-consuming, requiring several workers to shave the ice, haul the scrapings away, squeegee the surface, and then spray water and wait for it to freeze. Skaters either moved through sludge on bad ice, or waited. And waited. The process took about 90 minutes.
Frank Zamboni, who never graduated from high school but was an inspired tinkerer—he got his first patent, for an electrical resister, in 1928—figured there had to be a better way. Beginning in 1942, he experimented with idea after idea, using different configurations of water, heat, chassis, storage, and engines.
In 1949, he cracked the code.9 This was the Model A (pictured below). Built on a Jeep platform, a wooden box held the snow shavings; water dropped from a tank to wash the ice and was pumped back into the bucket. Then another layer of water was laid down for a fresh, clean surface. The vehicle looked ungainly, but it worked, resurfacing the rink with a clean sheet in 15 minutes.10
Restored by the company in 1998,11 the Model A still works, though it mostly enjoys a well-deserved retirement at the Paramount rink. The second Zamboni® machine, the Model B, was created in 1950, at the request of figure skater Sonja Henie, who saw the Model A and had to have one for herself. The machine earned a patent in 1953 and began its long, if lumbering, march across American ice. A Zamboni® machine was first used in an NHL game in 1954, and one scraped the ice at the Olympics for the first time at Squaw Valley in 1960.
Growth was slow at first; only 32 machines were built through 1956. As with the other inventions, though, there emerged a symbiosis between the product—good, clean ice—and the times, as many municipalities and schools began to build rinks. More than 10,000 have been sold.
But the Zamboni® ice-resurfacer is more than another example of ingenuity. It is a cultural touchstone. There is the rock song, “I Want to Drive the Zamboni®,” by the Gear Daddies, and the machine has been featured in television shows ranging from CSI to David Letterman. There are license plate frames that read, “My other car is a Zamboni®,” and a Zamboni® token in a hockey-themed version of Monopoly.12 The late Charles Schultz, an avid hockey player, had two of them at his home rink, and the machines made several appearances in his Peanuts comic strip.13 Snoopy drove one. Charlie Brown, as usual, got it exactly right when he mused: “There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire, and a Zamboni® clearing the ice.”14
1952
TIGERBELLE MAE FAGGS’S SHOES FROM THE HELSINKI OLYMPICS
A
t its height, the women’s track team at Tennessee State University1 may have been the most dominant athletic program in history, winning 12 straight national titles in the 1950s and 1960s. The secret to TSU’s success was simple: it was one of the few colleges where black women could get both a solid education and real coaching.
Not that it was easy. When Coach Ed Temple was hired in 1950, he recalled, the program consisted of “a partial track ending at a dump, no budget to speak of, three or four fellows, and two girls.”2 At the time, amateur clubs provided opportunities for some women athletes to compete, but few were based in the South. On the collegiate level, Tuskegee was the power at the time, winning 11 national titles between 1937 and 1948.3 Alice Coachman, the “Tuskegee Flash,” was the biggest star. She dominated US track for a decade and was the first African American woman to win Olympic gold, in the high jump in the 1948 Olympics.
But the TSU Tigerbelles were about to push the Tuskegee Tigerettes into second place. In 1952 Temple recruited a talented New Yorker, Mae Faggs, who had competed in the 1948 Olympics as a 16-year-old. Faggs would become the first American woman to compete in three Olympics. She wore these shoes in Helsinki.
Segregated Tennessee was a shock to Faggs, a New Yorker: “I was almost struck dumb by the situation in the South,” she recalled.4 But she stuck it out, in part because of her admiration for Temple, and in part because she was able to get work-study financial aid. Coach Temple was TSU track’s undisputed leader—benign dictator might be the better description—but Faggs was an enduring influence, known as “the mother of the Tigerbelles.”5
The Tigerbelles won their first Olympic gold in 1952, with Faggs and Barbara Jones comprising half the 4 x 100-meter relay team. That was the beginning of a remarkable run. Between 1952 and 1984, 40 Tigerbelles competed in the Olympics (35 of them for the United States), earning 27 Olympic medals, 15 of them gold.6 The Tigerbelles also succeeded off the track. Thirty-nine of the Olympians graduated from TSU, and the other earned her degree elsewhere;7 28 got advanced degrees.8 Sprinter Wyomia Tyus was 15 when she first met Temple and some of the athletes at the summer clinic he ran. “To me, the Tigerbelles were everything that I could see a woman should be,” she said. “It was not only that they were great athletes, but they were also women that were doing something to make careers for themselves when they were told, ‘No.’”9
Seven Tigerbelles made the 1960 US track team. Temple was the coach. (He made headlines by issuing a no-dancing edict that the Italian press found highly amusing.) And Wilma Rudolph was the star. The twentieth of 22 children, Rudolph was raised without electricity or indoor plumbing. Enduring polio, pneumonia, measles, whooping cough, and numerous other childhood illnesses, she wore leg braces until she was 12.10 No one could have predicted that she would become one of the most powerful, and elegant, sprinters in history.11
Rudolph had competed in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics as a fast but raw 16-year-old, running the third leg on the bronze-medal-winning relay team. (Faggs, whom Rudolph revered as a mentor and second coach, led off.12) In Rome, Rudolph was a well-trained athlete in her prime. With an ease that belied the years of hard work, Rudolph won the 100- and 200-meter races. “The sensuality of her sprinting was in that stride,” wrote a British track journalist. “Those legs running seemed to induce hydraulic elevation.”13
Her favorite event, however, was the 4 x 100-meter relay; all four runners were Tigerbelles. They broke the world record in a heat, then won the gold in heart-stopping fashion, with Rudolph coming from behind after almost dropping the baton. “My relay medal meant the most to me,” Rudolph later said. “I won it with my college teammates, for my coach.” An unknown before the games, Rudolph’s three gold medals—a record haul for an American woman—made her the belle of the Olympics. She was much more sought after than the gold-medal boxer, Cassius Clay, who desperately sought the attention Rudolph attracted without even trying.14
When her hometown, Clarksville, Tennessee, wanted to honor Rudolph, she agreed, on one condition: the celebrations could not be segregated. It was the first integrated parade in the town’s history.15 Two years later, she retired from competition. But the Tigerbelles kept rolling.
In 1964 Wyomia Tyus and Edie McGuire, fellow Tigerbelles (and high school teammates), went 1–2 in the 100 meters. McGuire won the 200 in world record time, and two Tigerbelles won silver in the 400-meter relay. In 1968, six Tigerbelles ran for the United States, and one more for Jamaica. Tyus became the first sprinter (of either sex) to repeat as 100-meter champion. Tigerbelle Madeline Manning became the first American woman to win the 800 meters.
The Tigerbelle record was astonishing, but their achievements barely registered, even on campus. Football was king at TSU. The track, located between a cow pasture and a pigpen, was an abbreviated dirt oval; sometimes the athletes lined it themselves. And yes, it smelled. “You ought to be down here when the temperature is 105,” Temple said in 1960. “Between the rocks on the track and the pigs, let me tell you, it is rough around here.”16 He regularly had to get out a shovel and clear the cow patties. After complaining to the governor, the team got its first scholarships in 1967; it didn’t have a complete track until 1978, after a Nashville newspaper featured photos of the giant potholes that pockmarked the old one. As Temple quipped, “Talk about Title IX? Shoot, we started at Title I.”17 (See 1972 entry on Immaculata.) The indifference was hardly unique to TSU, whose record was better than most; after all, it did at least field a women’s team. In 1958 the US track coach, George Eastment, estimated that fewer than 200 American women were seriously training in track-and-field.18
The irony is that the Tigerbelles got a track worthy of their talents just as their glorious run was ending. Though TSU sent several athletes to the 1972 and 1976 Olympics, and the team was nationally competitive into the early 1980s, the writing was on the wall. After being ignored and ridiculed for decades, women athletes of all races were being wooed by larger, richer schools, thanks to Title IX. The last Tigerbelle to win Olympic gold was Chandra Cheeseborough in 1984; she is now the coach at TSU.
In a sense, TSU’s relative decline can be seen as good news. Thanks to positive social changes in regard to both African Americans and women, by the 1970s TSU was no longer the only game in town for gifted black female athletes. They had more choices, and they exercised them.
Consider Evelyn Ashford, the premier American sprinter of the 1980s. She would have been a natural for the Tigerbelles, and Temple tried to recruit her,19 but in 1976 she accepted one of the first female athletic scholarships to UCLA. The university was close to home and offered training, travel, equipment, and facilities far superior to those of TSU. In 16 years of competing at a world-class level, Ashford qualified for five Olympics. She won four golds and one silver medal; she was also chosen to be the flag-bearer for the American team at the 1988 Games in Seoul. Jackie Joyner-Kersee (see the 1993 entry on her), who considered Wilma Rudolph her role model,20 also went to UCLA, and won six medals in four Olympics. These are not the kinds of careers even the greatest Tigerbelles could have imagined. But they helped to make them possible.
1952
MAGAZINE COVER FEATURING TOMMY KONO
O
ne of the redeeming qualities of sports is that they can offer structure and even purpose. Think of the child with indifferent parents who finds a mentor in a coach. Or the teenager who stays away from trouble to stay on the team. Or the people who train for charity runs in honor of a loved one.
Or think of Tamio “Tommy” Kono, sent to the Tule Lake internment camp in northern California as a 12-year-old for the crime of being a Japanese American during World War II. Ironically, the camp was actually good for his health; the dry desert air helped his asthma. And when a neighbor showed him how to use barbells and dumbbells,1 the boy took to it. Though his parents were concerned the activity was too strenuous,2 he worked out in secret and developed new muscle—and confidence.3
Among others who were interned at Tule Lake were Pat Morita, the star of the Karate Kid films; George Takei of Star Trek fame; Bob Matsui, who would serve 13 terms in Congress; and Emerick Ishikawa, a well-known weightlifter who would compete for the United States in the London Olympics in 1948, finishing sixth. Kono regarded Ishikawa with awe. The older man’s weights, he recalled, “looked like train wheels to me.”4 But Kono’s career would far eclipse that of his boyhood hero; for a time, he was the biggest star in his sport.
Released after the war, Kono’s family settled in Sacramento, where he finished high school—and kept lifting. He began training seriously in the late 1940s. By 1952 he was on the army weightlifting team and ready to compete internationally.
More than ready; Kono didn’t lose for the next eight years. That included two Olympic gold medals, one at Helsinki in 1952 (competing at 67.5 kilograms) and the other in Melbourne in 1956 (competing at 82.5 kilograms). He also won the world championships every year from 1953 to 1959. He slumped to a silver in Rome in 1960 (competing at 75 kilograms), and medaled in two more world championships (bronze in 1961, silver in 1962). Over this period, he set 26 world records in four different weight classes;5 the latter is an achievement no one has matched. In 2005, the International Weightlifting Federation named him the greatest lifter of the previous 100 years.6
While weightlifting has never been a sport that attracts much attention, Kono’s excellence could not be overlooked. Not only did he routinely make the magazine covers of the sport’s press, such as in the photo on the previous page, he was also an eight-time finalist for the Sullivan Award, given to the nation’s best amateur athlete, finishing second four times—behind shot-putter/discus thrower Parry O’Brien in 1959, sprinter Wilma Rudolph in 1961, miler Jim Beatty in 1962, and pole-vaulter John Pennel in 1963.7 He also had a successful career as a bodybuilder, winning the Mr. Universe title in 1955, 1957, and 1961.
After retiring from competition in 1964, Kono became a coach, working with the Mexican, West German, and American men’s teams, as well as with the first US women’s weight-lifting teams in the late 1980s. He published several books on weight lifting and designed weight-lifting equipment, such as knee and waist bands. Unfortunately, Kono saw US performance decline over this period; no American man has won an Olympic medal in the sport since 1988, and only one woman has done so.
Kono sometimes wore glasses when he competed, and he was highly regarded for his humane approach to the sport and generosity with young lifters. But in the heat of competition, he was an intimidating presence. When he “looks at me from the wings,” said a Soviet rival, “it works on me like a python on a rabbit.”8
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