OLYMPICS

Track hero Jesse Owens lived his latter years in Phoenix

Jeff Metcalfe
azcentral sports
Jesse Owens, center, after winning the 100-meter at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Owens lived from 1972-80 in Phoenix and died in Tucson.

Eighty years after the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens' story is being retold nationally on television Sunday and in a movie opening Feb. 19. 

"More Than Gold," a one-hour documentary about Owens and his historical importance winning as a Black athlete winning four gold medals in Nazi Germany prior to World War II will debut at 10:30 a.m. Sunday on NBC (Channel 12). Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman is the narrator, and the program includes interviews with three 1936 U.S. Olympians, historians and Owens' daughters plus archival footage from "Olympia," the official film of the 1936 Olympics made by German director Leni Riefenstahl.

'More Than Gold:' A Jesse Owens Documentary

The Focus Features movie "Race" stars Stephan James as Owens as well as Jason Sudeikis and Academy Award winners Jeremy Irons and William Hurt.

Owens lived in Phoenix from 1972-80 and died in Tucson. Republic sports writer Jeff Metcalfe wrote about Owens' Arizona connection in the following story that ran July 27, 1996 during the Atlanta Olympics on the 60-year anniversary of Owens' triumphs in Berlin.

It took Jesse Owens only 10.3 seconds to repudiate the myth of Aryan superiority that Adolf Hitler was foisting upon the world.

By winning a gold medal in the 100 meters on Aug. 3, 1936, and in three other events at the Berlin Olympics, Owens' role in history was like no other athlete before or since.

The 1996 finals of the 100 meters are being held today in Atlanta.

The Owens story of an Alabama sharecropper's son who became the greatest Olympian is well-chronicled, except perhaps for the final years. From 1972 to 1980, he lived in Phoenix, and had an impact on the Valley that still is being felt in significant ways.

A south Phoenix emergency-care center bears his name. His legacy is honored by the Jesse Owens Memorial Track Club. He was a regular at Camelback Country Club and the first black member of the Phoenix 40.

And now, the circle is complete.

In 1979, two weeks after the unsurprising news that 35 years of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day had caused lung cancer, Owens cradled the best Christmas present a dying man could receive: his first great-grandchild, born while Owens was making a holiday visit to Chicago.

Donovan Prather was just 5 months old when Owens died March 31, 1980, at University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson.

Now, Donovan is nearly 17 and will be a senior at South Mountain High School. His mother, Donna, brought her son here ''to get him out of the Chicago environment, it was so bad.''

''I wanted him to enjoy his teenage years,'' she said.

Where better, she figured, than Phoenix, drawing on pleasant memories of visits that continued 10 years after Owens' death to be with her grandmother, Ruth.

The Prathers came to Arizona soon after Ruth, now 81, returned to Chicago, and they continue an Owens legacy that is deeper here than most cactus-come-latelies can imagine.

Sports molds character 

The first record of Owens bringing his oratorial splendor to Phoenix was at a November 1964 banquet honoring the state's Tokyo Olympians.

Henry Carr, a two-time track gold medalist, was among those at the Hotel Westward Ho that night along with Ulis Williams, his Olympic mile relay and Arizona State teammate; ASU's Joe Caldwell, second-leading scorer for a collegiate ''Dream Team'' in the days when that was enough to win at the Olympics; Jeanne Collier, and Patsy Willard and Frank Gorman, divers from the fabled Dick Smith Swim Gym.

''Your medal will tarnish. Your emblem will fade,'' cautioned Owens, who admired great speakers more than great athletes and was both himself. ''But the experiences you derive from sports mold a code of practice that will remain with you all your life.''

This was the message, in one variation or another, that fed Owens and his family after 1936. Suspended from amateur competition on the very day that the Berlin Olympics ended for returning to the United States to capitalize on his four gold medals instead of remaining in Europe for other track meets, the 22-year-old learned a hard lesson about fame.

An African-American upstaging Adolf Hitler was one thing. That same man making a buck at home was another.

As the years peeled away, particularly the 12 until the next Olympics during which the real war against Hitler was fought, Owens no longer had to race against horses or agree to other demeaning gimmicks for a living. By 1950, when the Associated Press named him the greatest track athlete of the half century and he still could run 100 yards in 9.7 seconds, the climate was changing.

A patriotic, black Republican with a message of self-reliance and opportunity for all in America became appealing to corporate America. But Owens' views held no appeal for the more radical U.S. Olympians who saw the Games as a forum to protest racism.

''By the 1960s, he was out of touch with any cutting edge of society,'' said William Baker, a University of Maine history professor whose 1986 biography of Owens is regarded as the most balanced and definitive.

''It says reams about Jesse Owens that in social and psychological terms, he never did care for anything that Martin Luther King represented. In his heart of hearts, he wanted equal rights for black Americans, but the means to that end differed from King and those similarly moderate, let alone Malcolm X.

''Anyone who opposed the established order, Jesse had no sympathy for because he had grown up in an era when you got along by smiling and keeping your nose clean, not in opposition.''

At the explosive 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the U.S. Olympic Committee used Owens as a mediator with sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos after their black-gloved salute on the 200-meter medal stand. The dialogue quickly disintegrated into anger. Smith and Carlos were suspended by the U.S. Olympic Committee and sent home.

Carlos' argued that ''white America will only give us credit for an Olympic victory.''

''They'll say I'm an American, but I did something bad, they'd say I was a Negro,'' he said.

That message had to resonate somewhere within Owens. But even deeper was a belief in himself and the ability to overcome racism that caused him to brand those in the black-power movement as ''pro-Negro bigots.''

''If the Negro doesn't succeed in today's America,'' he wrote in the 1970 book Blackthink, ''it is because he has chosen to fail.''

Jesse Owens is shown winning the 100-meter dash at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

On track in Phoenix 

Two years later, Owens moved from Chicago to Phoenix. He bought a new home in the quiet of the north mountains where the city kisses Paradise Valley, took his enthusiasm for golf out on the Camelback Country Club and routed his 200,000 miles of annual promotional travel from an office called Jesse Owens Public Relations.

Another book, I Have Changed, was published in the summer of 1972, just before Owens went to the Munich Olympics with his 15-year-old granddaughter, Donna Prather.

''I knew the awe he was held in already, but it became on a large scale (in Germany),'' said Prather, who will speak about Owens to a national meeting of her sorority in Phoenix on Tuesday.

Whether Owens actually became more sympathetic to racial protest is arguable. Again without success, he tried to douse a fire started by African-American runners, this time Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett, who were inattentive when the national anthem was played during awards.

Certainly the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists combined with his negotiating failures cast Owens and 1936 as ancient history, relevant only to a Bud Greenspan, whose career as an Olympic documentarian includes the 1964 film Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin.

''Some people called him a (Uncle) Tom,'' said Owens' friend and golfing companion Joe Black, one of the first to cross the color barrier in Major League Baseball. ''He told them in 1968, I empathize with you, but the Olympics is not the platform to air dirty laundry.

''There are different ways to win a war. Jesse did it with his personality and talking to majority white audiences about America and how he, a black American, helped us to raise our heads (in 1936),'' Black said. ''Those messages penetrated people.''

Important people, like those who created the Phoenix 40, an association of the corporate elite whose aim of community service often was obscured by public debate about the self-appointed members and their closed-door meetings.

Although thought of correctly as a club for Anglos in its early years, the Phoenix 40 added its first African-American in the second wave of membership in May 1975: Jesse Owens.

''He said he didn't want to be a token member,'' said Bill Shover, director of public affairs for Phoenix Newspapers Inc. and one of the Phoenix 40 founders.

That was in some ways unavoidable, Shover told Owens, but he would have equal standing with other members of the organization, now called the Greater Phoenix Leadership Council.

Owens accepted, as he did most every civic opportunity, and there were many for an American hero who not-so-coincidentally made a boardroom appear progressive.

The Boy Scouts of America, what could be more fitting? Owens was on the national board. He applied his Baptist faith to his work with the National Council of Christians and Jews.

Locally, Owens' most significant project now carries his name. The Jesse Owens Memorial Medical Center was born as the South Phoenix Ambulatory and Emergency Care Center, the answer to severe flooding in 1973 and '78 that cut off medical care for Phoenix south of the Salt River.

Owens, a member of the Phoenix Memorial Hospital board since 1973, and Roger Lyon, president of Valley National Bank, were co-chairmen of a $1.5 million fund-raising drive to build a facility for a community of then almost 70,000, now almost 50 percent larger.

''He (Owens) wanted to be involved in communities most in need,'' said Reg Ballentyne, president of Phoenix Memorial Hospital Health Resources Inc., which has developed the 40-acre Owens campus between Central Avenue and Third Street, south of Baseline Road.

It includes the South Valley Medical Center, Mountain Park Health Center, Phoenix Birthing Project and a major primary-care group practice, South Mountain Physicians, all connected by the Jesse Owens Olympic Parkway.

''He was the leader of a campaign that gave the community an emergency-care center, which led to a campus and a way of developing campus-style care that has now been repeated elsewhere.''

The Owens center, an urgent-care facility since 1993, was dedicated Jan. 18, 1979, the same day another flood isolated the area.

Lyon and Owens, whose body by order of then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt was laid in state at the state Capitol before burial in Chicago, were dead of cancer less than two years later.

Kicks on Route 66

Chloride, north of Kingman on the way to Las Vegas, now is a ghost town.

But in the days when kicks were still to be found on Route 66, Chloride was a boom waiting to happen, or so someone convinced Ruth Owens.

She bought five acres and ''was entertaining the idea of building houses for all of us,'' said the middle of the Owens' three daughters, Marlene Rankin.

The Midwest winters and Owens' bouts with pneumonia triggered a move to Arizona, but to Phoenix instead, where he also had been a guest speaker in February 1968 and, at the junior college track nationals, in May '71.

''I loved the beauty of the city and the kindness of the people,'' said Ruth Owens, who returned to Chicago only because her age made being closer to family more important. ''I liked the pace because you weren't in a rush all the time.''

Owens slowed at least enough to indulge his love of golf on the Camelback course or at Orange Tree, where Black was a member, or on several other exclusive courses where Owens, who flashed some sort of honorary PGA card, was welcomed.

They played with Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, or Ralph Metcalfe, the Olympic 100 meter silver medalist in 1936, or at times most anyone.

Black tells of a couple in their 30's who kept looking back at he and Owens during one round. Finally, they waved them through, or so the men thought.

''Are you Jesse Owens?'' the husband asked.

''Yes I am, champ,'' said Owens, using his favorite term of endearment.

''Could we switch carts so you could ride with my wife for the last nine holes? That's the best present I could give her, and it's not even her birthday.''

Black now has the wood-handled putter that Owens used, which will not go to a collector as long as the 72-year-old former Brooklyn Dodger is alive.

''He'd say, 'Big man, let's go play golf,' '' said Black, who has dueled with the 300-pound barrier since the mid-1960s. Then, Owens would observe that Black's swing was impeded by his belly.

''He never put you down, but used little subtle things,'' he said.

Like saying Reggie instead of Reg, when addressing Reginald Ballantyne III.

''He was one of the few who could call me that and get away with it,'' Ballantyne said. ''There was a soft-spokeness, kindness, gentleness and sincerity about him.

''He was every bit as great as any of the select meganames of the present, yet he conducted himself in a truly professional, dignified, selfless manner. You don't see that often enough today.''

Black thinks Carl Lewis' attitude that he must run the final leg of the Olympic 4x100-relay or not at all would anger Owens. But Lewis, who at the 1984 Olympics equaled Owens' four gold medals and now is a five-time Olympian trying for his ninth gold, always credits meeting Owens as a 12-year-old in 1973 as an inspiration for his career.

''He pointed to me and fingered me out and said, 'See there, you should always be the best you can be. This little guy won the (long jump) competition,' '' Lewis said at the U.S. Olympic Trials.

''I don't remember all the words because I couldn't believe Jesse Owens picked me out to use as an example. It was an unbelievable, incredible situation. I went over and took a picture with him, starry-eyed and crazy. All of a sudden, I wanted to read all I could about him.''

Jesse Owens slept here

When Kristin Lloyd discovered the house she and her husband, Shawn, purchased in 1993, once belonged to Jesse Owens, she, too, was compelled to learn about the man.

Some facts are easily discovered, like Owens being a meticulous dresser. Even in publicity photos for the early years of the Phoenix 10K, he is in dress shoes and pressed slacks, showing the same upright form, like a cyclist stiffly riding an 1890s high-wheeler, that sprinter Michael Johnson wins with today.

Or that Owens threw great parties, something the Lloyds learned from their neighbors.

''We've kept up that tradition,'' said Lloyd, who also has taken time to maintain the roses that Jesse and Ruth prized.

The fireplace is different, no longer made of stone. During the remodeling, lights and the television eerily flashed with no explanation.

''My husband thinks his (Owens') ghost lives here,'' Lloyd said.

She points to the living-room wall where Owens displayed his awards and where Ruth kept the torch that their granddaughter, Gina Tillman, an Arizona State graduate, carried into opening ceremonies during the 1984 Olympics.

The Valley is rife with reminders of Owens. His spirit is at Rawhide, where he loved to take his grandchildren to experience the Old West as he envisioned it from his television favorite, Bonanza.

The flesh-and-blood heritage is maintained through the Jesse Owens Memorial Track Club, whose young members train even in the hottest afternoons at Central High School.

With Ruth Owens' permission, John Treadwell renamed the Cholla Striders after Jesse. Some 65 members have earned full college scholarships, he said. That would please Owens, who was obsessed with education. He did not complete his degree at Ohio State but was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1972.

''It gives the kids a sense of pride and honor running in his name,'' Treadwell said.

A Jesse Owens 8K was held for several years at the Owens Medical Center to benefit a children's fund. Ballantyne has a photo from one of those races of himself with Ruth Owens and two-time Olympic hurdling gold medalist Edwin Moses, but nothing of Jesse and his friend, Reggie.

Yet Ballantyne pulls letters from a file that tell more of Owens than a back-slapping snapshot. They accompanied money Jesse donated to a hospital for which he already was serving as a board member and million-dollar fund-raiser.

''Enclosed please find my contribution to your most worthy organization,'' wrote Owens, who in a recent ESPNET SportsZone survey of more than 3,700 voters was remembered as the greatest modern Olympian.

Even Ruth Owens is amazed by the acclaim for a man who died 16 years ago. This month brought the dedication of $1.5 million Owens Park in his birthplace of Oakville, Ala.

''It tells you the kind of person he was that he should be so well thought of because he has done so much to help the people,'' she said. ''He was just a plain humanitarian.''

American track and field athlete Jesse Owens at the 1972 Munich Olympic games.