E-mail a friendDavid Maraniss
airdate August 13, 2008
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post, David Maraniss is also author of four critically acclaimed best-selling books, including bios of baseball great Roberto Clemente and President Bill Clinton. Maraniss began his career in college in Wisconsin, covering high school sports and antiwar protests for a local newspaper. He joined the Post in '77, where he's served in various capacities. His new book, Rome 1960, is the story of the Summer Olympics that helped define the modern world.
Author talks about the extraordinary talents of Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph and Cassius Clay in the 1960 Olympics. (3:46)
Full Interview. (10:10)
David Maraniss
Tavis: David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and associate editor at "The Washington Post." He's also a bestselling author whose latest book is called "Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World." He joins us tonight from Madison, Wisconsin. David, nice to have you on the program.
David Maraniss: Thank you, Tavis, great to be with you.
Tavis: I suspect every athlete would like to think that he or she participates in an Olympic games that change the world in some sort of way, but Rome 1960 is deserving, at least by you, of an entire book because of how it changed the world.
Maraniss: Well, I think that you could see the modern world coming into view in so many different ways. Rome was the first commercially broadcast Summer Olympics, the first doping scandal occurred at those Olympics with the death of a Danish cyclist, the first athlete to be paid for wearing a certain brand of track shoes happened in those Olympics, and on the positive side, you saw really important advances for African Americans, women athletes, and Third World athletes at those games.
Tavis: I was just about to ask, given the list that you were starting to run down, David, whether or not they changed the games for the better - changed the world, that is to say, for the better or the worse.
Maraniss: I think it's both. I think that's the way change comes. You could see, the modern world brings good and bad. Certainly when people try to get nostalgic about the old days, they often forget that those old days weren't great for Black Americans and for women and for a lot of other people.
And so even though we want to look back at the purity, the lack of amateurism and professionalism from those days, change brings good and bad.
Tavis: I'm going to spring forward to 2008 and then we'll go back to 1960, because I want to see if we can draw some parallels here right quick before I go back to the book. So 2008, how are these games going to be remembered? Remembered primarily because we were in China, in Beijing, and all the controversy that erupted as a result of that, or remembered for this guy named Phelps, who keeps winning gold medals every 10 minutes, it seems?
Maraniss: Well, you've got to hand it to Mike Phelps - he's been phenomenal. But think about this, Tavis: He might break the record of Mark Spitz, right? But when you think of the 1972 Olympics, what do you think of first?
Tavis: The shootings.
Maraniss: Probably not Spitz. You think of the tragedy of Munich. I'm not saying that something like that's going to happen again, but I do think that from an historical perspective, as brilliant as Phelps is and as much as he will be remembered for history, that the real history is being made by China itself in how it handles these Olympics.
China introducing the world to China during what it hopes will be its century, with all of its problems and promise. You saw it all even in the opening ceremony. You saw some amazing scenes, and yet some of it was manipulated, right? That's sort of China. We're not quite sure which way it's going to go.
Tavis: I was about to ask you, do you have any sense of how it's going to go, notwithstanding the fact that, of course, an American is stabbed on the first day - stabbed to death, in fact.
Maraniss: Yeah. I think that that can be over-interpreted. Tragedy occurred in Atlanta. It didn't have the same political implications, even though that was a political act in Atlanta, as it turned out. So I wouldn't overreact to that horrible - except as a personal tragedy. But the censorship attempts by the Chinese, the manipulation of some of the opening ceremonies, the horrible pollution, the questions about human rights - all of those issues bubble up, and I think it's still an open question, whether these Olympics will somehow bring positive change to China or not.
I think it's naïve to think that one event can do that, but on the other hand, it's better than trying to ignore China.
Tavis: Back to these parallels between - or potential parallels, at least - between 1960 and 2008. One thing is clear - as we've just been discussing now, I think history is going to record that there were clearly some politics connected to these games in 2008. But take me back to 1960 and set the stage for me. Remind me of what the politics were at that time as these games were unfolding.
Maraniss: Well, this was the heat of the Cold War. Right before the games started, Gary Powers, an American U2 reconnaissance plane's pilot had been convicted of espionage by a Soviet court after his plane was shot down over Soviet territory. Before the games ended, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev set sail for the United Nations, where he pounded his fist and railed against the United States.
And it was exactly 50 years ago that China - Mao Zedong's mainland China withdrew from the Olympics altogether out of animosity that Taiwan was allowed to compete. The whole issue of the two Chinas was huge in 1960. Africa was at play - 14 new nations were getting their independence in Black Africa that summer, all fertile territory in the Cold War.
East and West Germany competed as one team in Rome, even though months later the Berlin Wall would go up. So wherever you looked there were the tensions of the Cold War and politics always part of the mix. In Rome in 1960, Taiwan was told it couldn't call itself the Republic of China because it wasn't geographically China.
So what did they do? They marched into the opening ceremony, the Parade of Nations, unfurling a homemade banner that said, "Under Protest." You always see that politics in the Olympics.
Tavis: Let me jump from the politics to the Olympians, the athletes themselves. There are three I want to discuss with you right quick here. I want to start with this particular person because you spend a good amount of time in the book talking about him, so I sense that he really got - he really pricked your imagination and your thought process. Rafer Johnson.
Maraniss: I think he's one of the great, underrated, underappreciated athletes of the 20th century. A brilliant decathlete who won the gold medal in Rome in a great contest against a Taiwanese athlete who also was his teammate at UCLA, CK Yang, a great decathlon match in two days in Rome. But more than that, Rafer Johnson was a man of great athletic prowess and personal character and dignity, and he was chosen to carry the American flag for the U.S. in 1960, during that early stage of the civil rights movement, when the Soviets were pounding away at the notion that how could the U.S. call itself a cradle of liberty when it was denying liberty to millions of its own people, including its greatest athletes?
Rafer Johnson deserved to carry the flag. He also understood that to some degree he was being manipulated by the powers that be, who wanted to present him as the face of the country. So he was a really, really fascinating man as well as a great athlete.
Tavis: I get tickled - he lives here in the L.A. area, and every now and then I run into him around town somewhere, and it's just funny to see him moving through crowds of people. I'm like, my god, that's Rafer Johnson.
Maraniss: Yeah, I know. (Laughter) And he looks like he could win the decathlon still today, doesn't he?
Tavis: Absolutely. I was about to get to that. The guy looks like he could still do some damage at the Olympic Games. So that's Rafer Johnson. Talk to me about the late, great Wilma Rudolph.
Maraniss: Wilma Rudolph, the true shining star of those Olympics. She won three gold medals in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter, anchored the relay team with her teammates from Tennessee State - the great Tiger Belles of Tennessee State. Wilma was a charismatic figure and a willowy, agile runner, and she'd overcome so much.
Childhood polio, scarlet fever, she wore leg braces as a kid. She was pregnant as a teenager - a teenage mother - and came to Rome and sort of stole the show. Everybody was madly in love with Wilma Rudolph. The European press called her the Black Gazelle, Cassius Clay, who we're going to talk about, was head over heels for Wilma, as was every athlete there.
Tavis: Yeah, who's this kid Cassius Clay you're talking about?
Maraniss: (Laughs) Eighteen years old, just stepping onto the world stage for the first time. He won the light heavyweight gold medal. He had the same personality as Cassius Clay in 1960 that he would have as Muhammad Ali, the most famous athlete in the world only years later, but he didn't really have the meaning behind it yet, so he was kind of like an entertainment - a bothersome little brother to the rest of the team.
He was afraid to fly, Tavis, so they gave him sleeping pills to put him on the plane to Rome. The pills didn't work; he yapped his way all across the Atlantic. (Laughter) By the second day in Rome, all of the athletes from Africa and Asia and around the world knew this 18-year-old kid from the U.S., Cassius Clay. By the third day, half of them were probably sick of him because he wouldn't stop talking about how he was the greatest and he was going to be the heavyweight champ, and talking in rhyme even then.
He won his gold medal in a really difficult, brilliant bout against a big old Polish left-hander, and then he wouldn't take his gold medal off. He wore it to bed that night and was walking around the village next morning when Lucinda Williams, one of the Tiger Belles from Tennessee State saw him and just looked at him and said, "Cassius, fool, go sit down for a while." (Laughter)
Tavis: Who knew he'd turn out to be, in fact, the greatest of all time?
Maraniss: Absolutely.
Tavis: Muhammad Ali. Let me close right quick with a story that I found absolutely funny. So we mentioned these great names of these great athletes that are revered around the world. This last person would never be revered because he only competed in one event, which he didn't make because he overslept.
Maraniss: (Laughs) Yeah, that was an athlete from Surinam. He missed the - he marched in the opening parade by himself and then they got the times mixed up and he missed his one event. (Laughter) That's probably an exaggeration, but closer to what most athletes go through at the Olympics. Most of them don't come close to the finals; they don't win anything. It's just being there that counts.
Tavis: Yeah, that is a funny story, though. He's the only guy representing his only - one guy representing his country, he's in one event, and he oversleeps.
Maraniss: (Unintelligible.)
Tavis: Yeah, well, hopefully none of the Americans will do that - Michael Phelps certainly isn't.
Maraniss: No, he's not going to miss it.
Tavis: No, not miss anything. The new book from David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is "Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World." David, as always, nice to have you on the program, and have a great rest of the summer.
Maraniss: Hey, thanks, Tavis, you too.
Tavis: Thank you.
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