Big Reaction for a Small, Raised Hand

I guess Tommie Smith was the best pure runner I have ever seen. Carl Lewis may have more power and Jesse Owens might have had more sheer drive. Mal Whitfield may have come close. But no one floated around a track more effortlessly than Tommie Smith. He was like a swan swimming, a bee flying. Something you could paint. Write verse about. As born to run as a 3-year-old colt.

He deserves to be remembered for that.

If Tommie Smith, the runner, had grabbed up the American flag that day in Mexico City in 1968 and done a victory lap around the track, there’s no telling where he might be today. The Statehouse is not out of the question. Instead, there are people who thought it should have been the big house.

Instead of draping himself in Old Glory, Tommie Smith wrapped himself in controversy.

He stood on the victory stand, shoeless, and raised a black-gloved fist in the air while the national anthem was being played and the Stars and Stripes raised. That’s the image everyone remembers.

As protests go, it wasn’t much. Smith didn’t hurl his gold medal back in the faces of the presenters. He didn’t douse the Olympic torch or hijack the shotputters or spray graffiti on the halls of Montezuma. He was just trying to remind everybody that the land of the free had also been the home of the slave.

It was something he had to do. But white America was scandalized. Tommie Smith had desecrated a sacred movement. He moved into the spot in the public mind with the guy who had shot Lincoln.

They called for retribution. They demanded quarantining.

The recollection of what he had done trailed him wherever he went. There were stints with a pro football team, the Cincinnati Bengals. There were stints in car washes and car lots. He had a master’s degree in sociology but he was like a man without a country.

It wasn’t as if he needed a Presidential pardon. Tommie Smith had never knocked over a liquor store or stolen a hubcap in his life. He had never done anything outside the law, not even double-parked.

But he came into public view so ostracized that people who didn’t know what he had done assumed he had taken the Lindbergh baby or poisoned aspirin bottles.

Tommie couldn’t understand it.

“Hey!” he protests. “People thought I hated all whites, that I was of an anti-honky frame of mind. I hated a system, not a people.”

He feels as if he deserved to be remembered for his race--the one on the track, not the one he was born into.

For, if the home run belongs to Babe Ruth, the knockout punch to Joe Louis, then the 200 meters belongs to Tommie Smith. His race at Mexico that October day in 1968, was more than historic, it was epic. It didn’t deserve to be drowned in politics.

Tommie Smith swept down to the finish line that day so far in front that he was able to throw his hands into the air 10 yards from the finish and exult as he went across the line almost with the brakes on.

He broke the world and Olympic records but there’s no telling what his time might have been if he hadn’t stopped to gloat. His 19.83, which stood for 16 years might have been a 19.6 or even 19.5 if he had been healthy and blase.

But he was so elated at having overcome a severe groin pull and the best sprinters in the world that he finished like a boxer who has just won a 15-round decision for the championship of the world.

Hardly anyone remembers that Tommie Smith. It’s Tommie Smith, the angry young man, who comes clearest into focus.

Tommie Smith never was that angry. He was carrying coals for demagogues like the sociology professor, Dr. Harry Edwards, and for his own firebrand ex-wife, Denise, who thought he hadn’t even gone far enough.

They wanted total boycott of the games, not a symbolic wave of a glove, and it was only narrowly, in a pre-Games meeting in Denver, that Smith and John Carlos, his fellow victory stand protester, had talked some of their fellow athletes out of withdrawal from the Olympics altogether.

The son of Texas cotton farmers, Tommie Smith, who grew up in Lemoore, Calif., could never forget what running had done for him--gotten him out of a lifetime of stoop labor. He was not about to throw his gold medal up for grabs among some European plodders who couldn’t have come within tenths of a second of him on a track.

Tommie Smith got the approval where it counted most. When he came home from the Olympics, his father, who had spent a lifetime picking cotton in the broiling sun, greeted him gravely. The Smith family, who had never done anything to society but give it a day’s work, had been recipients of hate mail, to say nothing of envelopes of manure in the mail box.

“Son, they tell me you done something down there, that you shook your hand in the air,” the father said. “Is that right?”

Recalls Tommie: “When I said I had, my father just reached over and shook my hand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you done right.’

“I was kind of choked up because that was the first time I remember my father touching me. We were not a very touching family and my father never hugged me. But I could tell he was proud.”

The racing Establishment was not so understanding. Tommie Smith never ran another race.

He will run in one May 17, during the Pepsi Invitational at UCLA’s Drake Stadium. He will compete in a special Legends 100 against Olympians like Randy Williams and Leon Coleman, and politicos like Senator Alan Cranston.

Smith, now 41 and the track coach at Santa Monica City College, is shortly contemplating shifting careers again to join the Sports Medicine, Education and Research Foundation, known by the acronym SMERF.

Does he regret not cloaking himself in Old Glory at Mexico City and leaving the protesting to street crowds in the nation’s capital or the sloganeers on campuses?

“No,” says Tommie Smith. “I wanted to make a statement and it seemed the time and the place for it. I’ll say this: It got noticed.”

Indeed it did. So much so that it overshadowed the achievement that made it all possible.

Doesn’t Tommie Smith sometimes wish that somebody, instead of calling attention to the gloved-fist tableau that set off a spiral of Olympic protests and boycotts and worse, would also note, “Oh, by the way, this young man also set an Olympic standard that would last for 16 years and a world standard that would last for 12?”

“Yes,” admits Smith. “And also that I once set 11 world records and held records in every distance from 100 yards to 400 meters and jumped 25 feet in high school.”

He would like to get to the point where, when someone would mention Tommie Smith, the observation would be: “Oh, yeah! He ran the greatest foot race at Mexico I have ever seen!” rather than “Tommie Smith? Didn’t he burn the American flag or something at Mexico once?”