Faster Than the Fastest

Faster than the Fastest sportsillustrated.cnn.com/longf orm/peacock/ Jesse Owens wasn’t afraid of Adolf Hitler or Jim Crow, but he feared Eulace Peacock By Michael McKnight Jesse Owens arrived in Lincoln, Neb., on a roll. It was July 4, 1935, six weeks after the Ohio State sophomore had burst onto the scene at the Big Ten championships, where he set three world records and tied another in less than an hour. The 1936 Olympics were 13 months away, but Owens’s stunning performance in Ann Arbor, etched into sports history as “the Day of Days,” made his success in Berlin a foregone conclusion. It was hot in Lincoln. One hundred degrees, according to some reports. Others said 102. A rare photo shows the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium in an unplanned whiteout: 15,000 white faces and white shirts glowing under the midday sun, everyone braving the heat to watch America’s new marvel dominate the AAU championships. The photo shows only four black faces amid the throng. One belonged to a short man peering from behind a starched shoulder about four rows back, the others to three of the six men racing in the 100- meter final. Arthur Daley, who covered track for The New York Times and would sail to Berlin the following summer as the first Times sportswriter to receive a foreign assignment, called the sprinters who took their marks that day the greatest field ever assembled. Foy Draper of USC, the 5- foot- 5 world- record holder in the 100- yard dash, was in Lane 1. George Anderson, the long- legged 10.4 man from Cal- Berkeley, was in Lane 2. Owens, approaching the starting line in Lane 4, his spikes leaving tiny volcanoes in the parched soil, was probably most concerned about the man on his left, in Lane 3. Ralph Metcalfe had won silver in the 100 at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, and two straight AAU golds. “The clash in this AAU championships meeting was supposed to be Owens (the new star) v. Metcalfe (the champion),” wrote Neil Allen of the London Times. Owens had no fear of the man on his right. He had blown Eulace Peacock off the track while winning the NCAA Championships in Berkeley two weeks earlier, after which he’d gone out dancing to celebrate. He had beaten Peacock and everyone else in San Diego a week after that. There was no reason to expect a different result in Lincoln. There were no starting blocks. Nineteen thirty- five lies closer to the Civil War than the present. Owens and the others dug holes in the cinders and tossed their hand- shovels to the infield before pressing their spikes into the footholds and their fingertips behind the chalked starting line. The starter, Johnny McHugh, fired his gun. The runners convulsed forward, then relaxed into a canter. False start. Then 10 more false starts. There were no disqualifications in those days. “McHugh finally walked over and talked to the finalists,” reported William Weekes of the AP, “then tried again. This time they got away in perfect order.” The gnat- like Draper darted to the lead, a hair ahead of Anderson, the loping F. Scott Fitzgerald look- alike from Berkeley. Not two seconds later, symbolic of the black man’s takeover of the sprints, Metcalfe, Owens and Peacock, in the middle three lanes, moved past the white men as if riding a segregated conveyor belt. “At forty metres the three Negroes were level,” Allen wrote. At 60 meters Metcalfe found the extra gear he was known for and shoved Owens behind him. Judging from the crude film of the race and records of previous meets, it’s safe to assume Metcalfe was surprised to find himself still a step behind Peacock. A woeful starter, Metcalfe stands with Usain Bolt as perhaps the greatest finisher in sprint history, and he proved it again in Lincoln, finding yet another surge, his long strides eating track in huge chunks. Peacock did not respond with his own burst as much as he continued the steady acceleration that began with McHugh’s 12th gunshot. He was the only man who appeared to gain speed throughout the race, like a coin dropped from a skyscraper. The whiteout photo was taken at the finish line. The first thing to breach it was the M on Peacock’s TEMPLE tank top, in a time of 10.2 seconds. A virtual unknown outside New Jersey and Philadelphia, the Temple sophomore had just broken one of sport’s most hallowed records (although it would later be ruled that “the Colored Thunderbolt was helped by a favoring wind,” as a journalist from West Virginia put it). Metcalfe finished second, Owens third. In Lincoln, Neb., on a brutally hot Independence Day in 1935, Peacock (left), a virtual unknown at the time, swept past prerace favorite Owens (Ohio jersey) and Metcalfe (second from right) for a landmark victory. Courtesy of Temple University The ever- gracious Owens (left) congratulated Peacock after the Temple star’s stunning double upset. “This was to have been Owens’ show, and Peacock took the play right away from him,” wrote Arthur Daley in the Times. Courtesy of Temple University Peacock recalled 50 years later that his first words were, “I won?” Owens tried to redeem himself in the long jump, where he twice surpassed the rare 26- foot mark. Then Peacock leapt 26- 3 and won that event, too. The next time a long jumper exceeded 26 feet in a losing cause, the calendar read 1960. Daley called what he witnessed in Lincoln “one of the greatest double upsets in the history of track.” Neither Daley nor anyone else could have foreseen that Peacock defeating Owens was about to become commonplace. Or that after Owens attained immortality in Berlin, Peacock’s string of successes against him would fade into obscurity, as would Peacock himself. Owens, according to his biographer William Baker, did not dance that night. Instead, he “spent a restless Fourth of July night in Lincoln.” Much of what we know about Owens today is myth, a tapestry of inaccuracy woven by sportswriters typing unfettered about a man who was both a once- in- five- lifetimes athlete and a people pleaser. Much like Satchel Paige, Owens generously wanted every scribe to have his scoop, such that he often gave several versions of the same story, each one tailored to whoever was listening. Owens had recently died when Baker, a history professor at the University of Maine with no experience in either journalism or track, began working in the early 1980s on what would become the definitive Owens book, Jesse Owens: An American Life. Baker did not seek to dispel the myths about Hitler “snubbing” Owens during the Olympics, or Owens receiving congenial advice from German long jumper Luz Long on that Berlin infield, but he ended up dispelling them anyway, the unavoidable result of an exacting historian conducting years of research. Baker also, for the first time, devoted more than a passing mention to Eulace Peacock. On May 31, 1983, the elderly Peacock, true to his reputation as a consummate gentleman, drove from New Jersey to Manhattan for an interview with Baker for a biography that not only wasn’t his, but also one that he knew would exhume his most painful defeat. Baker, now 74, no longer has the audio cassettes from that interview, only a fraction of which made it into his book. Fortunately, the University of Maine archived them. Along with a filmed interview of Peacock from 1985 (recently preserved by Washington University in St. Louis), these conversations offer a fleeting glimpse - - like a passing sprinter - - of the man whose defeat of Owens in Berlin wasn’t just possible, but probable, had Peacock somehow been able to outrun the Fates. They were born a year apart - - Owens in 1913, Peacock in 1914 - - in opposite corners of rural Alabama. By 1923 their families had left the sharecropping life and moved north - - the Owenses to Ohio, the Peacocks to New Jersey. In 1933, in the last meet of his high school career, Peacock set the national scholastic record in the long jump. He went home, clicked on the radio, and learned that a kid in Cleveland had just broken the world record. Name of Owens. It was the first time he’d ever heard of him. It was the first time anyone had heard of him. “I had that record for two hours,” Peacock joked to Baker. Peacock’s first love was football. He grew up wanting to play for legendary coach Glenn “Pop” Warner. When Temple hired Warner away from Stanford in 1933, Peacock’s stars seemed to have aligned, for his older brother, James, was the Owls’ captain. On the first day of fall practice in ’33, Warner put Eulace and the other Temple freshmen through a series of fitness tests. Ben Ogden, Temple’s track coach, meandered by as Peacock sprinted the length of the field. He did not need a stopwatch to realize what he’d witnessed. Over the next few days Ogden somehow wrested Peacock from Warner, robbing him of a weapon who had scored 138 points, the equivalent of 23 touchdowns as a high school senior. “That broke his heart,” Peacock’s daughter, Linda Freundlich, said recently of her father’s disappointment. “’So I can run fast, so what? I want to play football.’ That hurt him more than what happened with the Olympics.” Owens and Peacock first met at the AAU Indoor championships in 1934, where neither man sprinted but Owens outjumped Peacock by a full foot.

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