1976 Backyard Gold Medalist

This isn’t me. I had planned on shaving my head on 8/8/08. Not much going on up top there, but too much worry within. Work woes and the fear that I might end up actually looking like this guy kept me from the clippers. Instead, I’ll offer up an honest reflection from a bygone Olympic summer.

1976 Backyard Gold Medalist
by William Meiners

I was 10 years old in the summer of 1976. While my memory barely reaches back that far with detailed specifics, my mind does harbor images linked to the red, white, and blue of America’s Bicentennial. In suburban Indianapolis, I played baseball in our backyard and imagined myself to be a smaller, towheaded version of Joe Morgan. Several neighborhood boys, sporting either Keds or Converse, wore a rounded dirt circle, which made for a home plate, while a thinner patch of grass disappeared from where pitchers lobbed the tennis balls (a hardball substitute to spare windows).

That summer I cheered mightily for and against Reds. The first being the Big Red Machine of Cincinnati baseball fame which boasted Morgan as a diminutive second baseman. A Little Joe not to be confused with the youngest Cartwright from television’s “Bonanza” who flapped his back arm like chicken to time his swing, and, in spite of his stature, hit for pretty good power. But what impressed me most was his base stealing. Being a meticulous student of pitchers’ moves, Morgan always placed two feet on the Astroturf with his leads from first that often led to steals of second. The Reds clipped the Boston Red Sox in the 1975 a World Series that would go the seven-game distance. As a nine-year-old, I jumped into my father’s arms when Cesar Geronimo caught a can of corn in center field to end the game and the Series. In the fall of ’76 they would sweep through the Yankees for another championship.

With the onset of the Olympics in Montreal, I fell in love with the athletes from the good old U.S. of A., many of whom seemed to take on a certain patriotic pride in defeating the Reds of communism. Like many boys in my neighborhood, and maybe everywhere, I took my sporting cues from my father. The Reds, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, whom I thought we cheered for because we were Irish Catholic, and those ABA Indiana Pacers. I wasn’t a frontrunner, just lucky enough in those days to know that my teams happened to finish up pretty well. Even though the Pacers’ glory days were coming to an end, at least in the league with the red, white, and blue ball, the Irish would take home a national championship in 1977. Had I known then how precious and few victories in life would be, maybe I would have done more to savor them. But life was easy, and why should I ever expect it to be otherwise? We were the good guys, and I expected our teams to win.

There were reasons to hate the Communists, too. And I’m just talking about their athletes here; at 10 I did not know much about their politics. I heard they had to wait in line for toilet paper. I had vague memories of the try-and-try-again moments of the 1972 Olympic basketball game, where the Russians were given repeated chances to make a last-second shot to beat the American squad. Maybe I had just seen a lot of those replays.

My father told me the Communists used professional athletes against our strictly amateurs. These Russians, Cubans, and East Germans, all training full time behind some iron-blocked curtain, possibly using some sort of chemicals that made their women crawl through the water like pepped-up sea horses and toughened their men like steel. Can you imagine anyone trying to enhance their performances through chemicals? Those Commies had wings of hospitals devoted to chemical cheating.

Among those Americans I cheered for were the images of the impossibly long-striding Edwin Moses, cruising to an easy gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles (in sunglasses); Bruce Jenner and his decathlon victory lap with the small American flag; and a true, if not surprising, original American dream team of boxers. Even before the prodding of research and old newspaper accounts I can see clearly Sugar Ray Leonard hitting his opponents—Commies, Cubans, and otherwise—quicker than they could counter with anything. Of course I remember the Spinks brothers, Michael and Leon, the latter splendid in his toothless gold medal performance.

That Olympic boxing team had five gold medal winners, along with a silver and bronze. I did not remember John Tate, the heavyweight. After all, he only won the bronze. I remembered the man who beat him, Teofilio Stevenson, the renowned Cuban great who remained loyal to his Castro and never fought Ali or anyone else for the world heavyweight “professional” belt. It was not until I started looking back into the team, going to Google and tracking down bound copies of Sports Illustrated in the basement libraries of Purdue, that the man they called Big John would become anything but a forgotten athlete to me (if no one remembers who finished second, third place must be oblivion).


Inspired by the games in Montreal, I suggested trading baseball for Olympic backyard glory. At one point we had already set up an obstacle course that held all the trappings of suburbia. That idea came from watching the “Superstars” on television, where football players like Lynn Swann would compete against weightlifters, baseball players, even figure skaters, in events which included tennis, swimming, rowing, weight lifting, bowling, a baseball hit, a 100-yard dash, a half-mile run, a bike race, and finally the obstacle course. The aptly named Swann was as graceful an athlete as I can remember, effortlessly scaling the climbing wall before fluidly making his way through the course, whether he was crawling on his knees or gliding over hurdles to the tape of the finish line.

My own memory cannot locate the exact obstacles in our course, but I recall a picture of me in full stride, leaping from the picnic table past some target, perhaps a broom lying in the grass. The rounded red table was as close as we could get to a scaling wall, and we may have fashioned the picnic benches into low hurdles. I was swiftest among my 10-year-old cronies, so I stacked the deck in our Olympics—several short sprints, the obstacle course, which I owned, and whatever else relied on speed. I asked my mother to buy what seemed like gold, silver, and bronze prizes for young boys: a package of Bubble Yum for gold, Bubs Daddy bubble gum for silver, and I cannot for the life of me recall the bronze. Remember, I had to read to learn about John Tate finishing third. Maybe our bronze winner claimed some licorice prize. With the sun setting an evening or two before the competition, my mother caught me as I lifted myself upon an imaginary medal stand (probably a picnic bench), bent my neck for its gold medal draping, and somehow heard the beginnings of The Star Spangled Banner in my head.

It seems like Johnny Frymire won our softball shot put. Had we been really realistic we may have splashed some flour on our necks before spinning in that home-plated circle and putting the softball into the air when we could have thrown it much farther. Frymire, who my brother called “Football Cheeks,” also won the long jump. Of the Witskens, probably only Steve, and maybe even little Rick were among the competitors. Todd, by 12, a future professional who would go on to beat Jimmy Connors in the 1986 U.S. Open, was already playing in national tennis tournaments; he would have won our Olympiad with ease.

Our family owned one old pair of boxing gloves. My brother Bob, seven years my elder, used to get on his knees and put sweat socks on his hands (for some reason I always wanted to wear the gloves). With him genuflected down to my size, our bouts never lasted long. He would fend me off with his arms, still longer in spite of his dwarfed position, and flatten me with a couple of combinations. I would feel the sting of his large knuckles beneath the light cloth of the socks. And I doubt they came fresh from the dryer. More likely out of his drawers or straight off his feet. David Nemeth, the neighborhood heavyweight, and I attempted the lone boxing match of our Olympics. Both of us right-handers, we thought it was only fair to wear one glove each, exchange some wild hooks, and then switch gloves in consecutive rounds. In the confines of our basement, Nemeth and I were throwing haymakers and probably not holding back our ungloved hands. Whoever started off southpaw was at a distinct disadvantage. The match had to be stopped before the end of the first round—no clear-cut winner. With bloodied lips and bruised feelings, we thought it best to cancel the basement wrestling matches.

The final event came with a longer run down our winding Lakeshore Drive. My memory holds images of Bruce Jenner, finishing up his decathlon, so far ahead of everyone else on points that he only needed to keep within the pack during his 1,500-meter run. I do remember winning, claiming the Bubble Yum for my own. But the victory seemed less sweet, perhaps because I still stung from Nemeth’s fists.

However much I may have admired the real 1976 Olympic boxers, I was clearly unfit to even imagine being one of them. Anyone could trace the successful life of Sugar Ray Leonard. He turned Olympic gold into marketing green with 7-Up commercials. He stepped into the professional ring against the likes of Wilfred Benitez, Thomas Hearns, Roberto Duran, and Marvin Hagler, and nearly lost an eye for it.

John Tate never even learned to read. I learned that he left cotton-picking fields and shoe-shining streets in Arkansas to get on a bus for Tennessee. There he would train with a self-described “hillbilly” named Ace Miller, who also trained Olympian Clinton Jackson. Tate stayed on with Miller after the Olympics, went public about his illiteracy and desire to read, and captured the heavyweight championship of the world. He ultimately did the latter, but upset folks from the NAACP, because he went to South Africa to do it.

I tracked down Miller, still training boxers in Nashville, for a phone interview last December. “We were staying at the Waldorf Astoria,” Miller told me, “and some people knocked on the door and said they wanted to speak to John. I had to wake him up, saying ‘There’s some important black people here wanting to speak to you.’”

Big John offended the important black people by telling him he’d go anywhere in the world to bring the belt back home to America. He hadn’t read anything about the apartheid controversy. When he lost his next fight in a devastating 15th round knock out to Mike Weaver, Miller said, “he cried and cried,” feeling as if he had let everyone down. In a later fight, after Tate was twice hit in the back of the head by Trevor Berbick, the short-lived champion lay with his leg quivering inside a Montreal ring. Miller thought then that his boxer might be dying in the ring.

If, to steal from Simon and Garfunkel, there are boxers with stories seldom told, Tate, if nothing else, seems to have a story that’s almost common. He would never find success in the ring again after South Africa. He got in with a hard-charging, cocaine-fueled crowd on the streets of Nashville and had three falling outs with his old trainer. Tate eventually died when he crashed his pick-up into a telegraph pole. He had cocaine in his system. He was 42.


I learned to read and write at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. As classroom clown in 1977, I was suspended by Sister Joan Francis for a week in the sixth grade. She sent me home until my vacationing parents could return for a mandatory meeting. I’d leave the parochial system a year later, destined to become a C student in the public high school. But these were good schools, kept healthy by property taxes, and whether I personally excelled or not, the opportunity to read, write, and learn would never be denied to me. My high school had a big swimming pool and a planetarium as big as the night sky. I sometimes smoked pot at lunch before attending the astronomy class. Some other stoners and I would chase each others’ flashlights all over the ceiling’s starlit sky, and we giggled like third grade girls.

I learned to drink too much, dabbled in softer drugs, but never picked up deadly habits. Because I was an intensely uncomfortable speaker, not unlike Tate, I gravitated to writing, discovering how much louder I could be on paper. Since I turned 18, the only thing I have ever really wanted to do professionally, however much I manage to avoid it, is be a writer. While my sheer lack of athleticism would deter the dreams I had in 1976, I know the failings of my body, until fatal, should not distract my mind from literary pursuits.

Thirty-two years after America’s Bicentennial, I find myself more than nine years now in the basement of academia. I tell folks it’s been about a decade too long. I’m a hack writer for Purdue’s College of Engineering and I try and keep this small press literary magazine (devoted to sports, of course) alive on the side. I called Ace Miller from my office. I am not sure why I was surprised that he picked up the phone at his own gym, but I thought we could set up an interview for sometime down the road. He told me his heavyweight would be jumping rope for 20 minutes soon, and I could call back then. When I called back, the heavyweight answered and my “cart-before-the-horse” mind flashed to images of me, in the role of immersion journalist, trying to dodge the furious hooks of the man on the other end of the line. And I bet you anything this kid from tougher streets than mine hit a lot harder than Nemeth. But he sounded nice on the phone. He called for his coach and, once back, Miller materialized as the quotable fellow I had been reading about who may have come to dislike writers—sportswriters, hacks, propagandists, and otherwise.

Miller told me about meeting Tate, thinking he could make him the heavyweight champ, and even the struggle it took to coax him onto a Greyhound bus to leave Arkansas. He talked about the drugs and their falling out, where the smaller Miller was made to three times fear for his own life from a man they called Big John. The long story short is that when his storytelling ended and my questions began—about 10 minutes into his fighter’s jump roping—he objected to my line of questioning.

“You ask a lot of strange questions,” Miller said when I inquired about a quote in Tate’s obituary where his trainer said that he knew the phone call was coming. “Where are you heading with this?”

This was a jab I wasn’t ready for. In the voice recording, I am stammering a bit, trying to get back in his good graces. I tell him I am trying to tell the full story of John Tate—good and bad. “John Tate’s in the ground,” Miller snapped. “Why don’t you write about the success story of coming out of nowhere, becoming heavyweight champion?”

“It’s all part of the same story,” I said, my voice rising. “How can you write a history of a person without talking about how that person died?”

It did not go on much further from there. Miller said there was something in the drug that got hold of people and took them over. I tried to agree with him, but he had already declared me an enemy: a “media type” making money off the misfortunes of others. I went a little more on the offensive, telling him this was not a moneymaker for me, probably eliminating room for a second interview. I did thank him for his time before he hung up on me. Co-workers clamored toward my cubicle, asking about the Southern-sounding engineering professor I was arguing with. “I love the way you’ll fight with anyone,” said one writer who was one of three on his way out of the office by Christmas. It’s true; I’ll fight any engineering professor smaller than me, preferably in glasses.

Of course, I felt defeated by Ace Miller. Defeated as a fake journalist, as someone, like a boxer, who needed to be quicker on his feet. At 42 myself I seemed to be approaching yet another Christmas where I found confrontations almost everywhere. And if not exactly stepping into the middle of the fray, I had been at least preparing myself for it. Problems on the job and home front all seemed to be putting me into a fighter’s stance. I was a runner, not a fighter. But I figured that bell would force me into some sort of action, even if it meant me quietly walking away from the life I’d been living since the century turned.

It’s a relative existence we all live. John Tate had bigger fears to fry. I wonder if he sensed how close to death he was at 42. We grew up a million miles from each other and he did become heavyweight champion of the world. He went to South Africa to do it. Along with the 1976 bronze, he overcame much and had huge successes. But the brevity of that glory, like the imaginations of a 10-year-old backyard Olympian, would not be enough to sustain him. As the Games begin in 2008, I’m going to make note of at least one impressive third place.