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GAMES EDITION |
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Three Olympians that made Ron obsessive, from left: Rafer Johnson, 1960 Gold Medal winner in the decathlon Lightweight boxer Harry Campbell, who made the 1960 team with Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali), but later died in the ring; Mary Decker (Slaney), America's most celebrated middle-distance runner, in the 1980s. |
How the Olympics became
an obsession with me
of TheColumnists.com
There were no Olympic Games during the first nine years of my life, thanks to a rather troubling event known as World War II. Still, I was constantly reminded there were such things as the Olympic Games by my favorite jungle hero, Tarzan.
Before I explain about The Ape-Man, let me say that what I'm setting out to do in this column is explain how one man, not usually a sports junkie, has become obsessed with the Olympic Games. They have been part of my life--in some cases very up close and personally--for well over half a century.
Though I agree with my colleague Stan Isaacs
that the modern games have become crassly commercial and possibly
corrupt, I still exalt in those moments of sheer drama that somehow
emerge. Like colleague Joanne Englehardt, I doted on Olga Korbut.
Watching her struggle for supremacy at the Games made me passionate
about women's gymnastics.
And I'll confess I also had an obsessive desire to watch Mary
Decker run, anywhere, anytime. Heck, I don't know what it was,
but her kick just got to me. Her collapse on the track in the
1984 showdown with Zola Budd remains a vivid memory--and pretty
much ended my adoration of Mary, whose boorish behavior was a
scandal.
So, how did Tarzan lead me into this lifetime of obsessive behavior? Well, here goes:
Johnny Weissmuller and Larry "Buster" Crabbe were my favorite movie Tarzans and both men had been fabulous Gold Medal winners in swimming at several Olympic Games before the war forced a hiatus between that lasted from 1936 to 1948. Herman Brix, later known as Bruce Bennett, had been a U.S. decathlon star at the Olympics and he, too, played Tarzan in the 1930s. Glenn Morris, yet another Olympic decathlon champ, played Tarzan in 1938 and champion swimmer Eleanor Holm played his girl friend. She, too, might have been a medal winner if she hadn't "misbehaved" and been tossed off the Olympic team.
In other words, I knew about the Olympic Games even as a little kid because these superb athletes had become action movie stars right after their fame in Olympic sports events. Weissmuller was still the No. 1 Tarzan in the 1940s and the other Olympic Tarzans were constantly on view because their old movies were constantly recycled in kiddie matinees and, later, on television.
In my junior high school and high school days, I was greatly interested in track and field events and did some competitive high jumping, pole vaulting and running. That also meant I read about Olympic stars of those events all the time. For instance, I thought Olympic star Bob Mathias was a great role model. Heck, they even made a movie out of his life in 1954--and he played himself!
When I went to UCLA in 1958, the student body president was Rafer Johnson, the decathlon Gold Medal winner. When I signed up to write for the campus paper, The Daily Bruin, Rafer came to "cub reporter day" and shook hands with all of us. I idolized Rafer Johnson and thought his epic battle for the gold with fellow UCLA student C.K. Yang, who competed for Taiwan, was maybe the greatest one on one competition of all time.
Later in the 1950s, I finished work on my journalism degree at San Jose State College (now a university), the Olympics were all around us because SJS had one of the greatest track teams going. One of our guys--the great sprinter Ray Norton--was even officially "the fastest man in the world." I was editor of the summer edition of the newspaper in 1960 and our pages were constantly filled with the Olympic exploits of San Jose State athletes.
It was in those San Jose college years that I really got my Olympics fever. It was all because SJS, which had the NCAA's top intercollegiate boxing team, had placed several team members in the 1960 Olympic Trials, which were held at the enormous Cow Palace auditorium just south of the San Francisco city limits. I attended every session and wrote about it for The Santa Cruz Sentinel, where I worked at my first professional newspaper job.
My friend Harry Campbell, the NCAA lightweight champion, was the only SJS boxer to make it to the games, held that year in Rome. But SJS' boxing coach Julie Menendez (A guy despite his first name,) was named coach of the U.S. Olympic boxing team. Three of Julie's guys won gold medals in Rome--Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali; Eddie Crook, and Wilbert "Skeeter" McClure. Crook never turned pro, but McClure became a top middlweight contender and Ali became a boxing legend, perhaps the greatest heavyweight champ of all time.
Harry was eliminated in the quarterfinals, losing to an unknown Italian named Sandro Lopopolo. I eventually realized Harry hadn't disgraced himself by losing a points decision to Lopopolo, who eventually turned pro and became the junior welterweight champion of the world.
After the games, I followed Harry's pro career closely. Sadly, his undefeated record came to a close with a shocking points loss to journeyman lightweight Al Medrano, who had just stepped up from preliminaries. A rematch was quickly arranged and Harry lost another decision. I hung around, wanting to ask him what had gone wrong, but he collapsed in his corner and was rushed to the hospital, where he never regained consciousness. It later turned out Campbell had been injured in training and already was suffering from bleeding in his brain before the second Medrano fight. I was devastated. Harry was a great guy and a very stylish boxer-puncher.
Ironically, I profited from Harry's death in a grisly sort of way. I had taken photos of his collapse with my brand new camera, using fast Tri-X black and white film with just the ring lights for illumination. All other photographers had rushed out after the decision. I had an 8 a.m. photo class the following morning and when the guys in class heard I had shots of Harry's collapse, they rushed them into the lab. Next thing I knew, the photos had been sent out via Associated Press and wound up all over America in newspapers and magazines. The photo department entered my photos in the national Sigma Delta Chi student photography contest and one of them won first prize for best spot news photo of the year.
Though I never got a dime from the photos, I did get an "A" in photography, a course I was repeating because I hadn't earned a passing grade the year before.
While hanging out in the San Jose fight crowd, I also met two other former Olympians that I really liked. The first, Lou Molina, had been a lightweight on the 1956 squad. Molina didn't get near any medals that year, but he was a sensation as a pro, especially after he knocked out ranked contender Len Matthews in one round in San Jose. I wrote the first profile of Molina in a national boxing magazine, Boxing Illustrated, at that time.
Molina never got a title shot, but he defeated legendary former lightweight champ Joe Brown in a 10-rounder that drew an enormous crowd to San Jose's municipal baseball stadium. He also lost a 10-rounder to future Junior Welterweight champ Kenny Lane, televised nationally from San Jose.
The other ex-Olympian I got to know in San Jose was little Ray Perez, who was the flyweight on the 1956 squad. (There's a great photo of teammate Pete Rademacher, gold medallist in the heavyweight division, holding Ray in his arms like a baby.) Ray was a real little guy with short legs, almost like a "little person." But he had tremendous power in either hand and was a scrappy character. He had been seriously overmatched early in his pro career because there were so few little guys available in America. He went up against top international contenders when he should have been fighting four-rounders against trial horses. He got stomped a good deal, but was under new management when I met him and had put together a few wins. I really liked the guy, but he was already shopworn and no longer could take a good punch, so his career fizzled again.
Naturally, as I grew in stature as a professional newsman, my opportunities to talk with well-known Olympic stars increased. When Muhammad Ali turned to acting in the 1980s, I met him several times. Even then, I was concerned about his health. He couldn't talk very loud anymore and the ring damage that led to his Parkinson's disease already was evident.
Bruce Jenner was another of the former decathlon stars who went into show business and we crossed paths several times in the 1980s. George Foreman also fell into my domain when he regained the heavyweight crown after a 20-year layoff and signed to do a weekly comedy series on TV. In sharp contrast to Ali, Foreman seemed to have become more articulate after all those fights.
In the early 1980s, my wife and I bought a new house in Los Altos, CA, and discovered that we shared the back fence with two former Olympic stars--Ann Peterson, a bronze medallist in platform diving at the 1968 games, and her husband Gary Scheerer, who was on the 1968 water polo squad. I didn't see Gary too often, but Ann was very friendly and a good neighbor.
Up until the early 1980s, I'd say I had the average American's interest in the Olympic Games, watching the telecasts as often as I could when I got home from work. In 1984, though, my interest became professionally obsessive. I was then working in Los Angeles, which was the site of the 1984 games. My newspaper wanted me to watch as much as I could, so I decided to watch everything. That meant taping the late night telecasts and watching them the next day before early morning telecasts began. I watched literally hundreds of hours, writing daily for either the sports or entertainment pages, commenting on how the event looked from the TV screen.
The peak of my coverage came when I negotiated the opportunity to sit in a booth behind ABC News & Sports Pres. Roone Arledge as he supervised one full day of the Olympic coverage from ABC's Olympic sports center in downtown L.A. I was the only outside reporter there. I could hear everything said in the control room and see Olympic host Jim McKay in the studio set just below the control room. Watching Arledge make one hard decision after another while he scanned dozens of TV images from all the ABC cameras was one of the most absorbing things I'd ever seen in my life. I'd always admired Arledge and liked him on a personal level, but I'd never appreciated what a brilliant and talented guy he was until I saw him in action that day.
In the 1990s, doing a marathon Olympics watch became almost impossible. When the rights were divided between broadcast and cable networks, some events were farmed out to cable and separate channels were set up for different sports packages. There was just too much stuff for any human being to actually sit down and watch.
This year I'm watching only the stuff I really care about, but the truth is I really do care about quite a lot. Here's my simple explanation: The people who compete in the Olympic Games are people we all might know in one way or another. They might even live across the fence from you. They come from our ranks--the people. Watching them reach for glory is endlessly fascinating.
So, don't bother me for a couple of weeks, folks. I'll be obsessing again.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Aug. 11, 2008.
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