Betrayers and Betrayed
Beston, Paul
B y 1968 Joe Louis and Jesse Owens had long since settled into their roles as elder statesmen and revered icons of the sports world. They were also something like saints to black America. All that...
...Edwards upped him an adjective, calling Owens "a bootlicking Uncle Tom...
...Partly this is because boxing writing is invariably more dramatic than track and field writing...
...McRae builds effective tension in his description of Owens's two defining performances, at Ann Arbor in 1935 and Berlin in 1936...
...The protest he led on the medal stand, whatever one's view of it, was solemn and dignified...
...McRae describes how Louis's managers drew up a set of rules for him to live by...
...Both men were constricted in innumerable ways by their race, betrayed by a nation obsessed with color...
...All that they had achieved as athletes had come within a segregationist culture now rapidly falling away...
...In this way they hoped to avoid the hatred aroused by the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who earlier in the century had flaunted these and other racial conventions...
...They did it mostly in silence...
...But he probably invests it with too much significance...
...Owens's response was to flash his magnetic smile and avoid confrontation...
...Like so many ex-athletes, both men felt a void without the competitive stage...
...Louis was mercilessly derided by Ali, whose career of racial demagoguery is as accomplished as it is unheralded...
...Owens and his teammates were "ebony antelopes," and Owens was lauded by his own coach for excelling "because he is closer to the primitive than the white athlete...
...A has-been at age twenty-three, Owens toiled for years running novelty races against horses, greyhounds, trains, and, in 1938, Joe Louis...
...But voices of moderation were not valued in those heated days of rage...
...For that, McRae has plenty of material...
...Sometimes, it's hard for people to remember that...
...Heroes Without a Country is a dual biography of two men who helped pave the way for the integration of professional sports and the eventual dominance of the black athlete...
...Ali, then in exile from boxing for his refusal to serve in Vietnam, was the spiritual father of the Olympic protest...
...The book struggles to portray his later years with the same drama that defined his brief starring turn...
...in McRae's words, they missed the fulfillment of being "locked in battle [s] that felt more real than anything else in ordinary life...
...As Louis begins a downward spiral of financial problems with the IRS, drug addiction, and mental illness, we read on with morbid fascination...
...Owens paid the steepest price, having his career and to some extent his life taken from him over a petty squabble...
...The predominant one is racism...
...There is no suggestion that Black Power's rejection of Louis and Owens may have been the most cutting betrayal of all...
...Instead, he portrays the rift as a generational misunderstanding...
...For all of its focus on racism, this is still a sports book, and its highlights come in the chapters describing the two men's athletic achievements...
...But Ali, Edwards, and others let the fanaticism of the moment overwhelm what should have been reverence for men who should have been their heroes...
...That the story is familiar makes it no less tragic...
...In the second, he became the first man to win four gold medals in a single Olympics...
...It seemed an extreme punishment for a minor dispute, and it was difficult not to see racial prejudice in the decision...
...Once, their train was rerouted through Southern states because of equipment problems...
...Racing Louis was certainly less embarrassing than racing a dog...
...Though Louis and Owens float in and out of each other's lives, Heroes is in essence two separate tales with several common themes...
...It was probably the most politically potent sporting event in history...
...Louis's story also attracts because, like so many great fighters in the history of the game, his destiny was doom, and the reader knows it...
...The most offensive of thosecited by McRae is "K.K.K...
...The second betrayal consists of the difficulties both men had in their later careers, though this is harder to sustain...
...Owens and his fellows sat in petrified silence in the back car while a railroad guard threatened to remove them from the train...
...In their later years, Owens and Louis seemed less betrayed by racism than by emptiness...
...For McRae the race stands as a metaphor for the indignities visited upon the two men throughout their careers...
...In the first, Owens broke three world records in just over an hour...
...At the very least, they deserved the esteem of those most in their debt...
...One might also call it a betrayal...
...But it is also because Louis was able to hold the stage for so long—before, during, and after the War, he was the heavyweight champion in an age when boxing mattered profoundly...
...These caveats notwithstanding, Donald McRae succeeds in portraying the suffering behind the starstruck lives of two men who deserved better than they got...
...Louis managed to make millions of dollars from the ring, but he was no freer than Owens to walk his own road as a black man...
...Running and winning under the cold gaze of Adolf Hitler elevated Owens into the pantheon of sports immortals...
...It was only a few decades earlier, but already Jim Crow America seemed like another world—one where to survive and excel, they had had to bear all manner of inequities without complaint...
...track team, but is taunted for his trouble...
...By the author's own admission, Louis's money problems stemmed from his profligate spending, much of it because he was a soft touch for hangers-on...
...Indeed, for Donald McRae, betrayal is the heart of their story...
...McRae's overemphasis on the Louis-Owens race helps to highlight the main problem with the book...
...He would never be seen gloating, even smiling, after beating a white opponent...
...Eventually, Louis would be known to history as the Brown Bomber, a comparatively stately moniker that nonetheless would never be used today...
...McRae, alas, fails to condemn the Leninist tactic of the Black Power extremists who made all who disagreed with them into pariahs...
...Harry Edwards, then a sociologist at San Jose State, was trying to convince black members of the U.S...
...McRae makes much of this absurd race "won" by Louis when Owens conveniently tripped out of the starting blocks...
...We didn't make waves," he said late in life...
...But his spectacular career was over almost as soon as it started...
...After 1936 Jesse Owens lacked a stage...
...Kruel Kolored Klouter)," though "Panther with the Pincushion Lips" isn't far behind...
...The athletes ultimately decided against it, but if the boycott was off, the protest was still on...
...The book identifies three betrayals of its protagonists...
...Heroes Without a Country is a sobering and melancholy book...
...The final betrayal came at the hands of Black Power militants...
...His handlers were likened to animal trainers instead of fight managers, and he was assigned an endless barrage of humiliating nicknames...
...On the contrary, after McRae has so stirringly described Louis's greatness and dignity as a champion, the book's latter chapters make for a shattering read...
...As much as Louis and Owens themselves had suffered, they disagreed with the militants' incendiary approach...
...As for Owens, there just weren't many appealing options for him outside of gimmickry...
...Louis was merely following in a long line of heavyweight champions who had done silly stunts for extra money (one even boxed a kangaroo...
...The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside...
...Louis dutifully kept a poker face for much of his reign, exhibiting a self-restraint that would prove utterly foreign to the Black Power generation...
...Owens, sounding like a budding black conservative, said: "The black fist is a meaningless symbol...
...Louis scoffed at the idea of an Olympic boycott, saying of black athletes, "Where the hell else can they prove what they can do in competition with the whole world...
...Consequently, McRae's chapters on Louis's life after boxing are much more compelling...
...McRae says at the outset that his book is about the friendship between the two men, but their relationship doesn't really figure in the story...
...That's where the real power lies...
...Back then, our way was the only way...
...But by 1968 a younger generation of black athletes, following the example of Muhammad Ali, was speaking out...
...Because he refused to undertake a barnstorming tour after the Olympics, Owens was banned for life from amateur competition...
...The first is the blatant racism experienced during their athletic careers...
...McRae makes good use of newspaper language that describes both men in brazenly racist terms...
...Louis in particular was described throughout his career as something just short of a savage...
...No matter their fame and their successes, Louis and Owens were constantly reminded that they were black...
...Segregation and double standards for behavior hung over him wherever he went...
...McRae's treatment of Louis does not offer much new information, but the reader is more drawn to it anyway...
...Owens also faced hard times, but he eventually grew prosperous...
...He branded Louis an "Uncle Tom...
...McRae describes a painful scene in Mexico City where Owens attempts to mend fences with his successors on the U.S...
...If his amateur suspension was due to racism, it doesn't follow that his subsequent "professional" career was circumscribed by racism as much as by economics...
...Rejection by the Black Power crowd must have been the final indignity for these two great athletes...
...Joe Louis had to inhabit his role as heavyweight champion with equal care...
...McRae describes harrowing adventures as Owens and his black teammates traveled the country for track meets...
...Olympic team to boycott the upcoming Mexico City games as a protest against racism in America...
...But his blank expression was caricatured by white sportswriters, who saw it as the scowl of a simpleton, or worse...
...The demonstration on the Olympic medal stand of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gloved fists raised in the air in the Black Power salute, remains an enduring image of the 1960s...
...Louis, on the other hand, had a long career on some of the great stages in sports history...
...Tommie Smith, at least, does not appear to have indulged in such viciousness...
...Like Owens he had a showdown of sorts with Hitler, which he ultimately won by destroying Max Schmeling in one round in 1938...
...Louis would never be photographed with a white woman...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
