When Worlds Collided

Johnson, the favorite in the decathlon, took the lead on the first day with a shot put of 51' 10 3/4', the best in the field. AP

By David Maraniss

From Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, by David Maraniss. © 2008 by David Maraniss. To be published by Simon & Schuster.

More than half of the 305 athletes who would represent the U.S. in the Rome Olympics were in New York City on Aug. 15, 1960, for a send-off rally at City Hall. Besides Mayor Robert Wagner, a military color guard and a stairwell full of politicians, there was retired five-star general Omar Bradley, stirring echoes of a time when Americans had swept through Europe as liberators. World War II was a mere 15 years gone, and its aftereffects were still evident in Italy. Yet the conflict seemed as remote as the Roman Empire to many of the U.S. athletes, whose lives had been shaped by a relentlessly forward-looking postwar culture.

Rafer Johnson was chosen to speak for his teammates. "It is the goal of each of us to win a gold medal," he told the crowd. "Naturally, that's not possible for all.

But we hope to do the best job possible of representing our country." Simple words, even prosaic, but with Johnson the whole often was greater than the sum of its parts. He sounded self-assured yet humble. No one looked sharper in the U.S. Olympic team's travel dress uniform: olive-green sport coat, slacks, beige knit shirt. Johnson flawlessly called out the names of the dozens of teammates who stood at his side. He had a firm grasp of the occasion, and team officials took notice. His performance in New York, along with his stature as the gold medal favorite in the decathlon, convinced the officials that Johnson should be the U.S. captain in Rome and the first black athlete to carry the U.S. flag at an Olympic opening ceremonies. There could be no more valuable figure in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, which wasted no opportunity to denounce the racial inequities of the U.S.

Beneath his composed exterior, however, the 25-year-old Johnson was a jumble of emotions: joy, pride, anticipation, gratitude, determination and anger. He refused to be manipulated, yet he could not escape the burden of other people's expectations. He was aware, he later said, of the irony of representing a nation that treated people of his color as second-class citizens, but he also felt he could advance their cause most effectively by doing what he did best, which was to excel at his sport and comport himself with dignity.

That night, after an informal reception at the Waldorf-Astoria, three busloads of athletes set out for Idlewild Airport and the flight across the Atlantic. One plane, a prop DC-7C, carried the cyclists and weightlifters, some of whom spent the night drinking and gambling. Another flight took the heavyweight crew and the women's track team, which included eight members of the Tigerbelles, the runners of little Tennessee State University. The white rowers and the black track stars spent the night playing whist and pinochle together. The fleetest of the Tigerbelles was Wilma Rudolph, known to her friends as Skeeter, a nickname her high school basketball coach had given her for the way she buzzed around the court. The 20-year-old sprinter, whose track career had been interrupted by pregnancy and childbirth, had left behind her two-year-old daughter, Yolanda, with her parents in Clarksville, Tenn.

A third plane carried the Olympic boxing team, including an obstreperous 18-year-old light heavyweight from Louisville named Cassius Marcellus Clay. In Manhattan that week he had told Newsweek sports editor Dick Schaap that he would win a gold medal and be "the greatest of all time," but his fear of flying was so strong that it took all his teammates to persuade him to board the plane. If God wanted us to fly, he repeated over and over again, He would give us wings. According to light middleweight Wilbert McClure, Clay spent the night "talking about who would win gold medals and dada-dada-dada." Not for the last time, the man who would become Muhammad Ali was running his mouth and boasting to overcome his own fears.