David Maraniss Has Written Another Great Book

On the eve of the 2008 Summer Olympic games in Beijing, China, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and historian David Maraniss has produced an elegant perspective: Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World.

The book will be a treat for people born after that remarkable, first-ever commercially-televised Olympiad because Maraniss's story-telling and reporting skills bring the games, their personalities and layers of intrigue fully to life.

For those of us with some memory of the Rome games, the book’s interviews and documentation illuminate both the individual participants’ stories - - the emergence of Cassius Clay, the grace and guts of Decathlon champion Rafer Johnson - - and also the Cold War backstory and other '60's trends, all in wonderful detail.

In those days, beating the Soviets at everything, whether in space exploration, weapons' development or the Olympic boxing ring was a national pre-occupation.

So Maraniss gives us the news release battles between Soviet and American political leaders - - and also the often-hilarious story about our CIA's unsuccessful use of US track star David Sime at the Rome games to convince a Soviet athlete to defect.

The Olympics: those idealized, purely athletic contests only, right?

Sure.

I loved reading about the graceful, three-gold medal performance by American sprinter Wilma Rudolph, a polio survivor, that captivated athletes, spectators and reporters alike.

Her success was more broadly significant given the second-class status of women’s athletics, and the racial discrimination she and other African-American sports figures endured before the Civil Rights movement began soon thereafter to break down barriers across American society.

Maraniss brings Rudolph's medal triumphs fully alive, but it was an interview with her older sister Yvonne Rudolph that really brought it all home.

Yvonne Rudolph recalls an eight-year-old Wilma Rudolph finally shedding her leg braces to wear her first pair of regular shoes to church and delivering a speech where “everybody…cheered for her."

Maraniss's signature talent, book-after-book, is an ability to blend archival research, first-person interviews and then fresh language to connect sports, politics, race, and culture - - complex topics on their own that lesser authors would treat as separate and distinct.

That special literary architecture, that gift, is central to my favorite Maraniss books - - Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, and They Marched Into Sunlight: War And Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 - - and it's again on full display in Rome 1960.

The harsh reality of sport is that losers out-number winners, yet the also-rans complete the picture and leave their own memorable, even celebratory impressions, too.

The book is populated with losers who’d been favored to win, only to fall flat.

Or felt they were cheated by anti-American judges.

Or competed when hurt and suffered early elimination, like the deeply religious American high-jumper Joe Faust.

His story takes up just a mere five pages, and in lesser hands might have been an anecdote, or an omission altogether, but Maraniss tells us through Faust's experience a great deal about what is best in people, and the Olympic spirit.

During seven years of training, the teen-age California phenom had used each practice jump - - 100 a day - - as his private “cycle of repair,” with the crossbar an imagined crucifix over which Faust would leap “into the arms of a loving God,” wrote Maraniss.

Faust was living monastically in a Los Angeles cottage behind which he had built a makeshift jumping pit using a tattered mattress, poles and a bamboo crossbar when Maraniss tracked him down nearly fifty years after the Rome games.

“With no one watching,” Maraniss wrote, “Joe Faust was high-jumping still, with a sore knee but bounce in his step, practicing his cycle of repair, rising with penance, clearing the crucifix, absolving his sins, descending with gratitude.”

It is that kind of reporting and writing that will have readers telling their friends that they have to go out and buy this book.

Rome 1960 will prepare us for the stories and controversies likely to emerge in Beijing:

Records will fall and so will reputations.

Politicized judging will be alleged, as will cheating - - the Rome Olympics produced proof of some cyclists' doping and inklings of later-proven East German steroid abuses.

Will there be a fresh crop of disgraced track-and-field competitors this year, and by the way, are those new super high-tech swim suits a form of questionable performance enhancements, too?

And will there be a new subtext of super-power competition between US athletes and their counterparts from host-nation, gas-guzzling, air-polluting China?

Will 2008 be a broader battle of West vs. East, reminiscent of 1960's US vs. the USSR/Eastern bloc dynamics?

A personal note:

I first met David in 1973 when I was a young aide to then Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, and Maraniss was an even younger City Hall reporter for WIBA, a local radio station.

It has been a pleasure and an inspiration to have seen his career keep rising from Madison radio reporter - - and I think he even had a separate late night stint on FM radio playing what were probably albums in those days by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and "Cream" - - to Pulitzer Prize winner at The Washington Post, to an authentic American literary figure, top-rank biographer and historian.

(I was also interviewed for They Marched Into Sunlight.)

So let the 2008 games begin, and prepare yourself with Rome 1960.

I can't imagine a better summer read.

*****

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World, is a Simon & Schuster book. It runs 496 pages and costs $26.