George Kimball America At LargeI met Jesse Owens just once. Twenty-five years ago he had been invited to Boston for a television debate on whether the rules of the Olympic Games should be amended to allow professional athletes to compete.
Remarkably, Owens lined up on the negative side of this argument. He was joined in that position by Bob Mathias, the two-time Olympic decathlon champion who was then a Republican Congressman from California, and Harold Zimman, a member of the US Olympic Committee (USOC). (Arguing in favour of the proposition were Harold Connolly, the renegade hammer-thrower and former Olympic champion; skier Suzy Chaffee, and Boston Globe sportswriter Bud Collins).
On August 9th, 1936, Jesse Owens ran the first leg on the US 100-metre relay team to capture his unprecedented fourth gold medal at the Berlin Games.
One week later, on August 16th, he was suspended by the US Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for declining to travel to Stockholm for the final meet of a post-Olympic barnstorming tour across Europe, the sole purpose of which appears to have been to line the AAU coffers.
Owens never ran as an amateur again. Following a crossing back to the US on the Queen Mary, he was refused service at a number of hotels in New York. The Hotel Pennsylvania finally obliged by taking him in on the condition he confine himself to using the service entrance.
Owens had hoped his Olympic triumph would pave the way for a business career. Instead, he found himself picking up spare change by taking part in handicap exhibition races against everything from horses to baseball players.
In other words, if ever a man had reason to favour liberalising the amateur code it should have been Jesse Owens.
But that night in Boston wasn't the only time he found himself on the wrong-headed end of an issue. For the rest of his life he campaigned for Republicans, from Alf Landon against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to Richard M Nixon in 1968 and 1972. He was also dispatched to Mexico City in 1968 by the USOC in a vain attempt to forestall the planned victory-stand demonstration by Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
At the conclusion of that televised debate in 1972, Mathias, Connolly, Chaffee and I went off to a convivial Cambridge pub, where we drank until closing time. Jesse Owens did not join us.
A few months later I found myself in Reykjavik, Iceland, en route to the Munich Olympics. It was there I first met Dick Schaap, the broadcaster, sportswriter and bon vivant who would be a friend until his death in 2001.
A quarter-century later, Dick's son Jeremy Schaap has weighed in with a new book, Triumph: the Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics. Schaap's book offers what may be the first truly dispassionate analysis of an episode which has become shrouded in myth over the intervening 70 years, and punctures several folk tales which have been retold so often that they had come to be accepted as fact.
Later in his life Owens often recounted having been "snubbed" by Adolf Hitler, who refused to acknowledge his triumphs, but, points out Schaap, following an opening day in which he pointedly greeted Aryan winners while ignoring all others, Hitler was told by the IOC he must either congratulate all the champions or none at all. He opted for the latter, and thus did not greet any winners on the days Owens won his events.
Moreover, Owens actually boasted to reporters in Berlin that he exchanged waves with Der Führer after he won the 100-metre dash.
"Hitler didn't receive Owens, but he did not snub him - at least, that's not how Hitler's actions were reported by eyewitnesses," including, at the time, Owens, writes Schaap.
Owens was originally slated to participate in just three events in Berlin. He and Ralph Metcalfe were added to the relay team on the eve of the event, displacing Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only two Jews on the American track squad. The story goes that Glickman and Stoller were removed to avoid embarrassing Hitler.
Jewish himself, Schaap could have been forgiven for embracing that tale, but he remains sceptical in its retelling. The then-18 year-old Glickman (later a beloved New York sports broadcaster) probably would not have run in any case, and Stoller was probably replaced less because of his ethnicity than the fact the US coach, Dean Cromwell of Southern California, wanted to go with two of his USC runners, Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff. At least that is what Stoller himself believed.
The oft-told story goes that Owens offered to give up his place on the team to one of the Jews, but, Schaap points out, Owens had contributed to the controversy by lobbying to be placed on the relay team in an effort to win a fourth gold.
Triumph is Jeremy Schaap's second book, coming on the heels of Cinderella Man, his best-selling 2005 biography of James J Braddock. As in that work, he is at his best when placing his subject in the socio-political context of his time.
Owens' performance in Berlin undoubtedly rankled Hitler, dispelling as it did the Nazi claims of racial superiority, but not even Owens claimed to have been "snubbed" by Hitler until years later, when it became a popular topic as he made his way around the lecture circuit where he earned his bread and butter.
"In his mind, he easily justified his dissembling," speculates Schaap. "Denied by white America the opportunities for wealth that he thought he was owed, he exaggerated his stories to make a good living."
Having chronicled the exploits of his second successive Depression-era athlete (Braddock won the heavyweight title in 1935), Schaap, who was born in 1969, is already wondering where to go for his next book.
"Gee, I don't know," he said. "1937?"
