Berlin Games (15 page)

That year, Owens tried making it on to the Olympic team. His nerves meant that he ‘tightened up', however, and he did not even get past the Midwestern preliminaries. But Owens was to show his off his talents after the Los Angeles Games, when he beat a selection of American and European Olympians in the 100 and 200 metres. He
finished second in the long jump, only narrowly defeated by the Olympic gold medallist Edward Gordon.

In the meantime, Owens' relationship with Ruth Solomon had blossomed, and they supposedly married in July 1932. The principal reason for marrying so soon became apparent on 8 August when their daughter Gloria was born. Whether her parents were actually married remains open to doubt, however, as there is no record of their marriage, and there are inconsistencies in the accounts of their ‘wedding'. The couple undoubtedly did get married–supposedly for a second time–three years later. It would be fair to assume that Owens and Ruth had fabricated the earlier wedding in order to allay family sensitivities.

Owens' new role as a family man did not impinge upon his athletic achievements–he won seventy-five out of the seventy-nine races in which he competed at East Tech. In May 1933 he won all his events in the Ohio Interscholastic State Finals, smashing the long jump record in the process. In June he was to do even better. At the National Interscholastic Championships in Chicago, he set a new world record for the 220 yards of 20.7 seconds, and in the 100 yards he equalled the world record of 9.4. Cleveland embraced him, and upon his return he was given a victory parade.

Unsurprisingly, many universities clamoured for Owens to join them. Although his grades were not up to the mark, Ohio State allowed him to take ‘special tests' so that he could gain admission in the autumn of 1933. Owens found that the racial conditions in Columbus were almost as bad as they were in Alabama. He was barred from the men's dormitory because of his colour, and no restaurants near the university would allow him or his fellow black students to dine. Owens did manage to find a part-time job manning a lift in the State Office Building, although he was kept out of sight in the service lift at the rear of the building. He supplemented his income by giving talks to local schools, as well as by cleaning the cafeteria. He later claimed that he was earning some $350 per month ($5,000 in 2005). This seems to be a gross exaggeration, but there was no doubt that Owens was not a starving student. Academically, he fared less well, but then he was not expected to shine.

Over the next three years, Owens' star continued to rise. His two biggest rivals were his fellow Alabamans Ralph Metcalfe and Eulace
Peacock. Metcalfe was two years older than Owens, and far more experienced. He had won silver in the Los Angeles Olympics 100 metres, and bronze in the 200 metres. Peacock was a year younger than Owens, and they would run against each other several times. They were evenly matched, and in 1935 they even won alternate races.

Owens was soon to show his superiority over his two rivals at the Big Ten Championship meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May 1935. Owens arrived at the competition complaining of a bad back, which was sustained either through a fall or from a game of touch football. As with so many other stories associated with Owens, the precise details are lost in legend. Whatever the cause, the back was reputedly so painful that Owens doubted he could compete, yet willpower and a hot bath strengthened his resolve. He struggled through the preliminaries, and spent the night in agony. Fortunately, the weather was warm the next day, and Owens found that his back responded well to the heat. That day, 25 May, was soon to become one of the most remarkable in the history of sport, let alone athletics. At the long jump pit, Owens asked for a handkerchief to be placed at the 26 feet mark. He sprinted down the track and leaped past it, landing 8¼ inches beyond. The distance was a new world record, but as Owens did not wish to strain his back, he did not try to better it. In the 220 yards he won with a time of 20.3 seconds–smashing a world record that had been on the books for eleven years. In his weakest event, the 220-yard low hurdles, Owens' time of 22.6 seconds constituted yet another world record. In the 100 yards, Owens equalled the world record of 9.4 seconds, although the starter's stipulation that the watches should be stopped only when the runners' back feet crossed the line surely counted against him. What made Owens' accomplishments all the more remarkable was that they had taken place in just one hour. After the meet, Charles Riley drove Owens back to Cleveland, where he found his face all over the Sunday papers the following morning. With typical modesty, Owens told one reporter that he found all the praise ‘a little too high'.

The next several months were not to be the easiest of Owens' life. Mobbed wherever he went, he soon found that he had attracted the attention of many adoring female fans, who were charmed not only by his physique but also by his radiant grin and utterly charming
manner. One fan, Quincella Nickerson, would prove to be a femme especially fatale. The daughter of a rich Californian businessman, Nickerson fell for Owens, and from all appearances he did for her. Soon, the glamorous couple were being photographed wherever they went–most heartbreakingly for Ruth, even in a jeweller's shop. The affair made the front pages of the national papers, which speculated about when the couple might get engaged. Ruth did not let her man get away with it. She harangued him over the telephone in July before the AAU championships in Lincoln, Nebraska, and even more distressingly, Owens was confronted by a journalist who threatened to expose Owens' daughter on the front page unless Owens married Ruth. As a result, Owens' performance at Lincoln was poor–he finished third behind Peacock and Metcalfe in the 100 metres, and second to Peacock in the long jump. Owens left the championships as soon as he could, and when he arrived back in Cleveland he married Ruth in her parents' living room on the evening of 5 July.

For the next few races, Owens found that he had lost his form, and Peacock beat him five times in a row. Some thought Owens was ‘burned out' and championed Peacock as the star of the forthcoming Olympics. Worse was to come, however. In August, Owens found that his job as a page at the Ohio House of Representatives was being investigated by the AAU, which felt that his acceptance of the job–essentially an honorary position–was a breach of his amateur status. On 12 August Owens was summoned to attend a meeting of the Northeastern Ohio AAU in Cleveland. The committee members heard that Owens had never done ‘anything that really discredits him', although one committee member disgracefully thought it pertinent to bring up the matter of Owens' marriage. This was dismissed as an irrelevance. The committee found that Owens had not breached their rules, but Owens announced that he would return $159 that he had earned in order to soothe any doubters. Nevertheless, the affair rumbled on, and it was not until December that the AAU issued its final verdict. ‘We have considered Owens to be a victim of circumstances,' it reported.

Owens continued to attract controversy. In November, when he was asked his opinion of the boycott movement, Owens replied, ‘[…] if there is discrimination against minorities in Germany then we must
withdraw from the Olympics'. This statement earned him an immediate censure from his new coach, Larry Snyder, who warned Owens that if he continued to preach against the Games, he would be ‘a forgotten man'. If his athletic and personal lives were problems enough, a few days after Christmas Owens found that his academic life was similarly troublesome. His report showed that he had performed so poorly that he would not be eligible for the winter indoor track season. If his grades were as bad the following term, the report warned, he would not even be allowed to compete during the summer outdoor season.

Winning the Butler Indoor Relays in March 1936 was therefore an important part of Owens' rehabilitation. What gained him even more applause was his behaviour at an indoor meet in Cleveland's public hall. Once again, Owens found himself lined up against Eulace Peacock in a final–this time the 50-yard dash. As soon as the gun went off, Owens shot out of his blocks, but Peacock's block slipped, and he fell to the floor. All he could do was to get up and watch helplessly as his rival glided effortlessly to breach the tape. As soon as Owens heard what had happened, he insisted that the result did not count. The defective starting block was repaired, and the race was held again. This time, Peacock won, but the star of the day was undoubtedly Owens, who had showed a remarkable degree of sportsmanship.

Magnanimity does not win places on the Olympic team, however, something of which Owens was all too aware. Although his ‘scholastic troubles' had abated, his athletic performance was still not as good as it might be. In the six major races in which he had competed against Peacock since the previous July, Peacock had beaten him five times. There was no doubt that Owens was a tremendous athlete, but it looked as if he had peaked at Ann Arbor. Once again, cynics started to write him off, and his enforced ‘idleness' during the winter season appeared to have taken its toll. If any American was going to win gold in Berlin that August, it was almost certainly going to be Peacock. Indeed, very few would have bet against him. Owens may have had the charm, the fascinating and somewhat controversial private life, but Peacock had the raw ability and the results to prove it. It looked as if combining athletics, academic work and family life was just too much for the twenty-two-year-old from Oakville. ‘It's going to take a special man to defeat Eulace Peacock,' said Owens. ‘You see, I've already
reached my peak. Peacock is just now reaching his. He's a real athlete. I don't know whether I can defeat him again.'

 

1,400 miles west of Cleveland, another young man from a small town was dreaming of Olympic glory. His name was Glenn Morris, and he came from Simla, Colorado, the smallest of the little towns on the prairie. If Jesse Owens was not a poster boy for the archetype of All-American Athlete, then the handsome Morris, at 6 foot 2 inches and weighing 182 pounds, most certainly was. In fact, the twenty-three-year-old's life was the epitome of the small-town-boy-makes-good story. The second of seven children, Morris moved from St Louis, Missouri, to Simla when he was just three. His parents grew kidney beans on a 160-acre farm some three miles out of town, and life was predictably hard. Like Owens, he may have worn raggedy clothes, but he was well fed.

The 5-kilometre track to town was the key to Morris's athleticism. ‘We walked to school,' his brother Jack recalled, ‘hiked it in summer and winter.' Sometimes, Morris would run to school, but his brother said that he never ran back as it was uphill and ‘would have been real tough'. Nevertheless, back at the farm Morris had made himself a mini-sports ground, complete with a high jump pit, a long jump pit and even a selection of hurdles made out of old sticks. Morris's father found his son's obsession with athletics somewhat trying, and Jack recalled how Glenn and his father had ‘some real set-tos' as Morris would much rather be practising his athletics than hoeing the kidney beans. Apart from that difficult uphill stretch on the way back from school, Morris would run everywhere, jumping over fences and creeks. However, he struggled against an affliction that could have ended his athletic career early–he had asthma. Sometimes he would fall to the ground, struggling to catch his breath while his helpless mother looked on, terrified. But Morris's single-mindedness meant that he did not treat the disease as a handicap, merely as something that needed to be overcome.

Unsurprisingly, Morris excelled in sports at school. Unlike Owens, he also performed well in the classroom, and even edited the school newspaper. It was not until 1930, however, that Morris began to show some real promise. At the Eastern Colorado League high-school track
meet, he won first place in six different events, and broke the records for the high jump and the discus. At the Colorado State meet, he came third in the hurdles, a result with which the driven young man was disappointed. His hunger for victory was noticed by many, and some saw him as a little moody and introspective. ‘Glenn was more of an observer,' one school friend recalled. ‘He liked to watch other people, quietly, and think about things.' Despite, or perhaps because of, this moodiness, Morris was, according to his brother Jack, ‘always good with the girls'.

That year, Morris was admitted to Colorado State College in Fort Collins, some 160 miles from Simla. Like Owens, Morris found himself a good coach. Morris's was Harry Hughes, his football coach, who later recalled that Morris was ‘as green as the stadium grass, but I knew I had a natural born athlete in the rough […] He was as quick on his feet as a cat, and he had a hair-trigger mind.' Morris played right end at football, and he was renowned for catching even the longest of passes. For a while, it looked as if he would take up the sport professionally, but it was while competing in the hurdles at the Kansas Relays of 1935 that Morris's head was turned by another sport–the decathlon. When Morris returned to Simla, he told Harry Hughes that he could do better in the event than the athlete who had won. His quest to win the decathlon at the following year's Kansas Relays became an obsession. After he graduated, Morris dedicated all the hours when he wasn't working as a car salesman to training.

Morris still had time for love, however. During his senior year, he met a petite brunette called Charlotte Edwards, who was reading home economics and hoping to become a teacher. ‘Charlotte had several other guys who were crazy about her,' her sister later recalled, ‘but she was fascinated with Glenn.' She and Morris were soon an item, and Edwards's fascination with her new boyfriend extended itself to helping him train for the decathlon. ‘She really helped him,' he sister recalled. ‘She would go to the track with him and time him, and then go home and prepare special meals.' Charlotte even regulated Morris's diet. ‘I made him quit all starches except whole wheat bread and eat meat twice a day with stewed fruits,' she said. ‘He lost ten pounds but said he was stronger than ever.' (It would appear that Charlotte's diet was a forerunner to the Atkins.) In fact, there were no
limits to Charlotte's loyalty. No matter what the weather, she worked out with him for two hours a day, chivvying him along. ‘I would start him on his distance runs,' she said, ‘then dash across the field and shout at him after he rounded the turn, the time he was making.' Apparently, Charlotte also lost 10 pounds.