Hitler’s Olympics, Part 7: Long Jump, Tall Tale

In 2020, in a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them, except one, a woman named Lydia Abrams, known as Dia, whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Dia's family and friends, and I've discovered that everyone has a different version of events.

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On a warm day in August 1951, a helicopter appeared in the sky above the Berlin Olympic Stadium. 75,000 people had gathered there to watch a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game. The crowd looked up. The chopper, circled three times and landed on the field.

The loudspeaker announcer called out attention, attention.

A black man in a white suit stepped out onto the red Cinder track.

Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest run in the world returns to Berlin.

Jesse Owens was back in Germany to take a victory lap.

I had many thoughts as I made the symbolic run of victory around the same red cinder track that I'd run so many years before. As I passed each section, there was a bridge to the past.

The Second World War had ended only six years earlier, and Germany, along with the rest of the world, was still reckoning with it all. Whatever was left of the Nazi leadership had been grilled at the Nuremberg trials. Berlin was rebuilding after allied bombing campaigns. About 80 of the city's center had been flattened.

The crowd came forth with a tremendous roar and the cheers are with me today.

Owens stood for an ovation that one of the globetrotters said lasted a full 15 minutes. And I think maybe it was then standing there, watching how hungry that crowd was. For even this mention of a good German, that he decided to tell an even bigger story about what happened between him and Lutz Long. At the 1936 Olympics, it was the start of the Great Long Jump tall tale.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. Throughout this series. We've been looking at how people tried to rationalize their participation in Hitler's Olympics, and in this episode we've reached the most enduring, and I think heartbreaking rationalization of all. Jesse Owens story about befriending a Nazi.

Our home was in Alabama, and my parents were sharecroppers on this particular place.

In 1961, Jesse Owens sat down with an interviewer to record an oral history. She, a white woman in cat's eye glasses and pearls Owens, wore a suit. The two sat in mid-century modern armchairs so close their knees were almost touching, the curtains were drawn.

Now, that's where it all began, isn't it? Yes, in junior high, junior high school, captain of the basketball team.

I was impressed the first time I heard him list all those accomplishments, He was obviously great from the start. But the second time I listened, I noticed just how worn out he sounds going through that list. That tone has a lot to do with how I came to understand Jesse Owens. He's telling the story of his life in this oral history.

Do you get tired of this sometimes? Oh yes, you get tired of living in a glass bowl.

Living in a glass bowl.

But it's a wonderful thing to have people to recognize you, people to admire you for your ability.

But sometimes people forget you're a human being.

People were looking, everybody's eyes were upon you and they would scrutinize everything that you did. And so therefore you have to be very, very careful of the things that you did. And it's a tough thing sometimes.

By the time he taped this interview, people had been telling stories about Jesse Owens, mythologizing him for decades. You can even hear the interviewer doing it.

How did all this make you feel now? Remember, you're a youngster from the cotton fields of Alabama. This is all relatively new to you, and suddenly you're the captain of so many things, and you're a good student and people like you.

And that, I think, is at the heart of why Jesse Owens made up that story. About Lutz long helping him during the broad jump qualifying rounds, and about their friendship all those years afterwards. First, being an athlete made him somebody, then when that was done, telling stories about it kept him a somebody. But he was Black in early 20th century America.

If you're the first to come along, or you're a pioneer, you represent not just yourself, but you represent your category. And he's being asked to represent his category in a way that obviously no white athlete is being asked to represent their category.

Yeah, and I actually think what's striking looking at Jesse Owens life is how early that starts for him. I mean, it's really he's sort of a superlative athlete from a very young age, and then this just keeps happening to him. It was the same when people started boycotting the 1936 Olympics, wondering if he would, too.

He's at the time, how old?

I think he's 22.

So we have this kid who is being asked to parse one of the most complicated kind of moral and political questions of the time. And he's being torn in two directions.

At first, Jesse Owens seemed to see the situation in Germany clearly the violence and the discrimination, and he supported the boycott. He knew what it was like living in the United States under Jim Crow and segregation, he said in a radio interview. That quote If there is discrimination against minorities in Germany, then we must withdraw from the Olympics.

But you could have given up at this point, you didn't have to go on with it. If the recognition and the status hadn't been as important to you as it was, you could have said, I'm through with this nonsense. I'm going to finish my education and go on and become a lawyer or something else.

Why, at this point, become?

See, you're not any greater. Then the people will make you. You can do a number of things, but if the people are not with you, then who knows about it?

Leave the glass bowl, become a forgotten man.

He's a yard or two out in front. Matt Kapp is coming second up on him, the world's most superb runner.

He won gold medals in each of his events the 100 and 200 meter dashes, the 100 meter relay and that legendary broad jump. And for a lot of people, all those medals seemed to validate his choice to go.

Well, let us hope that all these are just rumors.

Jesse Owens was banned for life from amateur sport. The 1936 Games would be the last act and the pinnacle of his athletic career. He went to the press with a rare complaint. I came over to Europe with only $10 in my pocket. To make matters worse, I've lost six pounds being pushed around and circused all over Europe.

Cuba Jesse Owens, The Ebony streak of Olympic Games.

Celebrates turning professional by racing against a horse.

Jesse had a start of 40 yards in 100 and he won by inches. So what?

So when Jesse Owens went professional, that essentially was the choice he made to spend the rest of his life reliving those two weeks. In August 1936, he was trapped, as if he'd jumped into that broad jump pit and sunk to his knees in quicksand.

Hundreds of times, to how many papers and magazines a person? And this has been broadcast certainly, many, many times. But for the Historical Library, we'd like to have a record of the Olympics in your own words.

His job was telling the story of the Olympics. And once she asks, he gets right to it.

I remember it was in July, July, the 4th.

Of 1936, when we had the final tryouts for the Olympics at Randalls Island and that was the 4th and the 5th.

But the thing about telling one story for your entire life is that the meaning of that story has to keep changing with the times. To stay marketable, to keep enough eyes on that glass bowl. And in 1951, at that halftime speech during the Harlem Globetrotters game, he discovered its most powerful addition, Lutz Long.

In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Idyllwild, California, five women disappeared in the span of just a few months. Eventually, I found out what happened to the women all except one, a woman named Lydia Abrams, known as Dia.

I guess, first, can you tell me about that Globetrotters game in the Berlin Stadium in 1951?

Sure.

I'm talking to Damien L. Thomas, curator of sports at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He's the author of the book Globetrotting African American Athletes and Cold War Politics.

The Harlem Globetrotters were just starting to travel internationally. And they had played a game in Frankfurt a couple of days before. And one American official had asked them to play this game in West Berlin.

In the Cold War, the U.

Basketball Wizards Extraordinary.

Their patented blend of bring-and-play.

And Zany Capers has made them the most popular team in the history of the sport. Before the NB.A. was a big deal. Before Black people played even college basketball in any great numbers. The Harlem Globetrotters were a kind of traveling basketball circus, true to the name, they were all over the place.

The Harlem globetrotters were also so deeply tied to minstrelsy, which was the dominant form of entertainment in America from the 1880s through the early 1950s.

The players, almost all Black Americans, were often referred to as clowns.

People often didn't think of sports as having ideological content. And so, whereas other forms of American culture would be resisting, sometimes coca-cola, sometimes blue jeans, rock and roll and American movies were shunned. People often welcomed basketball because they didn't think of it as having a propagandistic function, but it did. And it's one of the things that made it very important is that people didn't see it as containing hidden messages.

A lot of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War called out the lie of American equality. The U.S might talk about all people being equal, but the country was segregated, and really, only white people had a shot at a decent quality of life. It was true.

A clown with the longest arms in the sport, with his 7 foot overall reach, he rakes in $7,000 a year from a team which grossed a million last season.

You would see these situations where maybe Goose Tatum, who was the lead clown, would lay on the floor and read the newspaper while the game was going on on the other end of the floor. Designed to stress that African Americans were lazy and then were unresponsive or weren't mentally engaged in the game. And so you saw all of these various ways, where these stereotypes play out in some of the comedic routines of the globetrotters. It allows the State Department to make the argument that African Americans don't have full equality, don't have all the opportunities that are available to white Americans. Because they are lazy, they're not as intelligent, they are not ready to occupy a space of full equality.

The State Department needed Black success stories that also made segregation look okay. Enter the Globetrotters and Jesse Owens And how did Jesse Owens become involved in all this?

All throughout the 1940s, Jesse Owens had traveled sporadically with the Harlem Globetrotters, and he would serve a variety of functions. He would serve as the press secretary, the announcer during the game, and also as halftime entertainer, and typically, when he performed during halftime. They would set up hurdles around the court, and Jesse Owens would jump over the hurdles around the court as a halftime entertainment spectacle.

At one of the Globetrotters promoters events, he ran a race against another Black athlete on his hands and knees, even worse than that horse race in Cuba.

He writes about that, and he writes about how he felt humiliated and felt as if he was being treated less than. But then he also writes, Well, what else was I supposed to do? What were the other options available?

And that is how, in 1951, Jesse Owens returned to the Berlin Stadium at the behest of the State Department as the Black superstar, with a story to tell about a kind Nazi.

And this became one of the most requested stories that Jesse would tell on the speaker circuit.

After that trip to Germany, Owens began to tell increasingly elaborate stories about Lutz Long. By the 1960s in public. The story had grown to Lutz Long. Helping Owens to qualify later came the Apocryphal Letters. But with each version of that story, Owens was masterfully navigating the complexities of Cold War U.s racial politics.

Actually, Ben, it's worse than that because the story itself has its own kind of implied racial bias. Which is, he's not just being instructed about how to conduct the long jump, he's lost control of his own emotions. Yes, he's being instructed about how to control his emotions.

Actually, he's not being told how to control his emotions, he's being told how to handle the fact that he will continue to be unable to control his emotions. By jumping, it's worse. It's not like Lutz Long comes up and is like, Here's a transcendental meditation that I think you could do to really get this under control.

The meta story in that story is so kind of weird and distasteful, and Jesse Owens is forced to play along with this kind of deeply offensive.

Narrative, That's the really sad part, though he's not forced to play along with it, he generates the narrative. There's many people that I'm suspicious of, who play several meaningful white co-writers on this story, but I really think that Jesse Owens is the.

First mover. He's so internalized, he knows enough about what it means to be a Black man in 1936 that he knows that. That's the story, that's the plausible version of the story.

We almost always tell the story of Jesse Owens gold medals as a story of triumph. Actually, Triumph is the title of a best-selling book about him. It's the name of a Jesse Owens History Channel documentary that just came out. And I'm not saying that Jesse Owens didn't triumph or that he didn't enjoy the fame or the money, but look at what two weeks of triumph cost him.

In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Idlewild, California, five women disappeared in the span of just a few months. Eventually, I found out what happened to the women, all except one, a woman named Lydia Abrams, known as Dia. Her friends and family ran through every possible way, with endless theories.

Jesse Owens had been telling one version or another of the Lutz Long Story for nearly 20 years when it finally went mainstream in 1968.

I've very often seen pictures from you and the photographs.

Of my father, please tell me about this competition here in the stadium, because I have my father only seen for three times. I was born 1941 and my father died 1943..

Remember, Kai was still a kid when his dad died? He didn't know his father. And in the film, Jesse Owens tells him a story about how his dad helped Owens qualify for the broad jump.

Kai You probably don't know it, but your father was.

Greatly responsible for my winning the Broad Jump in 1936.

I fouled on one and didn't go far enough on the other.

And your father came to my assistance.

And he helped me measure a foot.

Back of the takeoff board, and he held the.

Tape until I measured a foot back.

As far as my takeoff was concerned.

And then I came down and I hit between these two marks and therefore.

I qualified and that led to the victory in the running broad jump.

He seemed to say, Sure, your dad would go on to fight with the Nazis, but he was a good man. Kai asked Owens if he'd like to recreate the famous photograph of his father. They laid down in the grass together.

It was a new Olympic record 26 feet 5 and 1 third inches. The first one to greet me was Lutz Long, an athlete of special courage. He put his arms around him and we walked down the broad jump runway directly in front of Chapley-Hitler's box.

The Bud Greenspan documentary meant that Jesse Owens finally had it all again. His fame, his financial security and his Olympic glory back, and all that had come just in time for another Olympic Games, Mexico City, 1968. By that point, Avery Brundage had become the first American president of the International Olympic Committee ever.

Yesterday, they came in first and third in the 200-meter dash and then stood.

On the victory platform with Bowed.

Heads wearing black socks and gloves in a racial protest.

Keiter said that when Jesse Owens learned what Smith and Carlos had done, he sat there and repeated three words to himself Oh my God.

They were also breaking a very important unwritten rule in America, which is, you don't criticize the United States in foreign land. And so, Jesse Owens was aware of that rule in the 30s and in the 40s, and he was certainly someone who abided by.

That that's Damien Thomas again, Smithsonian Sports curator.

Jesse Owens is from an era where it was important for you to be a credit to your race. And so the way in which you advance. African-American opportunity access was through good behavior, it was through embodying these middle-class values chastity, thrift, temperance. But by 1968, African-Americans are half of the players in the N.B.A. a third in the N.F.L. and a quarter in Major League baseball. And so the mere presence of African-American athletes is no longer seen as progressive in and of itself.

Avery Brendage was apoplectic, and in one of the most deeply cynical twists of fate. Brendage and the International Olympic Committee asked Jesse Owens, whom they'd previously banned for life, to go see Tommy Smith and John Carlos, to ask them to apologize and promise not to protest again. And he did, he was received the way you might expect.

Smith Had I been a good boy in Mexico, I could have probably been monetarily richer, and I would.

The day after their protest on air, Owens radio co-host asked him to compare the Black Power salute with being snubbed by Adolf Hitler in 1936.

Hear me, Okay, I can, yes.

Okay, fantastic. I had one last question How did Jesse Owens feel about making this story up? Did he ever talk about it with anyone? So I called Tom Ecker once a great track and field coach.

I met with Jesse Owens a few times and then I'm. I brought him to Cedar Rapids, where I live, and he came here and spoke to a group and he.

Slept in your daughter's bed, Tom's?

Wife Carol Yeah, he slept in our house. Wow.

So you guys actually had a good relationship?

Yeah, we got along really well. He told a lot of the same stories that I love.

To hear one of those stories, of course, was the Lutz Long broad jump. Tom had heard the story before, but it didn't quite add up. He'd never seen any official account of an interaction between Owens and Long during that qualifying round. He knew the famous sports writer Grantland Rice had been watching the event through his binoculars.

Oh, yes, yeah, I talked to. We talked about Lutz Long and the fact that most of that was made up.

He admitted to it.

Oh yeah.

Why did he make it up?

Oh, he.

Wanted to just be able to tell good stories.

And that that was.

A good story.

We all know what's true.

I'm left with this image of Jesse Owens falling asleep in a little girl's bed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Where he's once again been called to tell his great story. And what dream could visit him? Then, that one day, he woke up alone in a strange land and stepped out onto a great field in a big glass bowl. To fight for a country that didn't want him, against the people who were most supposed to hate him. And then, all of a sudden, one of them reached out and touched him.

We posed as his father and I did on the grass of the stadium. And though it may seem a little childish, doing it brought back memories of a warm interlude.

In my life, when a fellow athlete showed a special.

Grace and a special courtesy when I needed help. I've experienced many moments in the sun, but perhaps the most rewarding was to have Lutz long beside me on the winner's platform.

Revisionist History is produced by M.e. Ben Nadof-Haffrey, Tali Emlin and Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact-checking on this episode by J..L. Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Guerra.

You said you almost died last night. In fact, no one can believe you were alive.

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