Hitler’s Olympics, Part 6: The Jiggle & the Giddy Up

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Speaker 23 Bushkin.

Speaker 32 About 4,000 athletes competed in the 1936 Olympic Games.

Speaker 32 Jesse Owens

Speaker 32 is the one people remember.

Speaker 32 Jesse Owens starts moving.

Speaker 33 He's the yard or two out in front, and that camp is coming second up on him.

Speaker 32 Jesse Owens was born in Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, self-effacing, soft-spoken, and an unbelievable athlete.

Speaker 32 In 1935, as a 21-year-old, he had already set three world records in a single day, all in the same hour, with a bad back.

Speaker 33 The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking as he wins the final and equals the world's record time.

Speaker 32 And in 1936, even the Germans were expecting something great from him.

Speaker 32 How many gold medals do you hope to win?

Speaker 32 It's the desire of every athlete to win a first place in an Olympic game. In 1936, he was slated to compete in three events.

Speaker 34 And since I'm in three events, I hope to emerge with three victories. I hope.

Speaker 34 200 meters and broad jump.

Speaker 32 100 meters, 200 meters, and the broad jump. Later, they added a fourth event, the 4x100 meter relay.
He would win gold in all four.

Speaker 32 The only person to win four gold medals in the Berlin Olympics. And that is why you know the name Jesse Owens.

Speaker 32 But it all could have turned out differently.

Speaker 32 Because of that broad jump.

Speaker 32 You've seen a broad jump before. Today it's called the long jump.
And it's one of the more dramatic Olympic sports.

Speaker 32 The jumpers sprint down the runway, hit a takeoff board, and they look like they're flying. And then they land in a huge spray of sand.
So, the morning of August 4th, 1936, 10.30 a.m.

Speaker 32 In the Reichsportfeld, it's the long jump qualifying rounds. Best jumpers go on to the final.
Owens had just run his heat in the 200 meters. Immediately after, he headed over to the pit.

Speaker 32 It was the third day of the games, and by then he already had his first gold medal. So, it was a surprise when he botched his first jump.
By some accounts, he thought it was a practice run.

Speaker 32 No sweat, though. He had two more tries.
So he lined himself back up and started jogging down the runway. He took off and came up short.

Speaker 32 He had one jump left.

Speaker 32 If he screwed up that last jump, he'd have been out of the contest, and he'd have gone from being the only athlete to win four gold medals in 1936 to one of three athletes who'd won three golds, right up there with Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek, who actually would have had more total medals than him.

Speaker 32 And I ask you, be honest, have you ever heard of Conrad Frey and Hendrika Mastenbroek? No.

Speaker 32 And probably, if he'd missed that final qualifying jump, you wouldn't have heard of Jesse Owens either.

Speaker 32 So after the first two misses, Owens was rattled. But then

Speaker 32 something miraculous happened. Something that changed the course of Jesse Owens' life

Speaker 32 and made him a legend.

Speaker 32 I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 27 Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 36 In this episode, Ben Nadaf Hafrey and I are talking about one of the biggest stories to emerge from the Berlin Games:

Speaker 35 a story about two athletes making good on the promise of the Olympics, cross-cultural understanding, sportsmanship against all odds.

Speaker 2 A moment that became key to the Olympic mythology and to the legend of Jesse Owens.

Speaker 35 A powerful, incredibly important story that's hiding a very big secret.

Speaker 32 It was cool that day in August. Clouds had rolled in over the stadium.
Around 100,000 people were in the stands watching. And America's most famous athlete, Jesse Owens, was screwing up.
Badly.

Speaker 32 Which makes no sense. All he had to do was jump 7.15 meters to qualify.
He already had a world record for jumping a meter farther than that. So what was going wrong?

Speaker 32 Malcolm and I decided to ask an expert, a legend actually. It was about 10 years ago or so, the age of 65 I think.
And I jumped further than my high school mark. You see?

Speaker 14 And you're the first American to jump 57 feet.

Speaker 32 One of the greatest American triple jumpers of all time, Milan Tiff.

Speaker 32 I actually jumped 60 feet, but they didn't wouldn't recognize it because I jumped out of the pit.

Speaker 32 Where did you do that? Right here, you say what? Wow. And

Speaker 32 I completely jumped over the sand pit and landed on the grass. I had grass stains all over the back of me.

Speaker 32 Going to see Milan was Malcolm's idea.

Speaker 35 So when I was in high school, starting at the age of 12, I became a competitive runner and I was obsessed with track and field.

Speaker 35 And I subscribed to Track and Field News, the Bible of the Sport, as it's called.

Speaker 31 And Milan Tiff

Speaker 30 was

Speaker 38 this extraordinary,

Speaker 36 first of all, he was astonishing looking.

Speaker 35 He looked, there was something kind of ethereal about him. And he had, as a kid, he couldn't walk because he had, I think, polio or something.

Speaker 35 And he was also an artist, really, really bright colors and kind of wildly imaginative and a little bit psychedelic.

Speaker 19 But I was...

Speaker 35 I was just obsessed with him as this kind of like

Speaker 38 this

Speaker 38 strange otherworldly figure.

Speaker 35 And he was a favorite in 1980. Had we not boycotted the 1980 games, he might well have won a gold medal.
Anyway, I cannot wait.

Speaker 35 He's going to be a little bit...

Speaker 38 He might be a little. I don't know, but I have a sense that

Speaker 32 he might be a little out there.

Speaker 32 This turned out to be pretty prescient. After meeting the Lon Tiff, I felt like I had taken some kind of intense psychedelic, the effects of which have yet to wear off.
The first humans.

Speaker 32 It's unbelievable. I understood that to walk is just to take a number of tiny long jumps.

Speaker 32 I found myself transfixed by an actually gorgeous painting of Milan's portraying a pair of empty tighty whiteys suspended in a blue abstract space called, mysteriously, Palm Springs.

Speaker 32 And the birds and the trees would all fly down. They're just tapped into the same frequency as I have when I'm running and jumping.

Speaker 32 We flew out to Los Angeles where he lives so he could take us out to the UCLA track.

Speaker 32 And when we got there, there were several helicopters hovering above us the whole time, which only made everything a little more surreal.

Speaker 32 And Olympic legends just walking up to him, literally bowing down. This, I think, because they wouldn't normally see him.
He told us he prefers to run in the morning. By which he meant 3 a.m.

Speaker 32 Tiff took us out to the broad jump pit.

Speaker 32 to help us get inside Jesse Owens' mind, which we thought he could do because he's a master of the approach, the part Jesse Owens was screwing up, but also because.

Speaker 32 So you actually knew Jesse Owens when you were a kid. Yeah, yeah.
You know,

Speaker 32 I'd sit and he'd tell the stories,

Speaker 32 and I'd hear all the stories. And, you know, he talked about his experience in Berlin.

Speaker 32 You know.

Speaker 32 We asked him to tell us about how you're supposed to approach a jump.

Speaker 32 You gotta have a giddy up first. That kind of rocking.
You have to have some, or a jiggle, you will call it. Yeah.
You have to have a jiggle or a giddy up before you even get into your run. Yeah.

Speaker 32 That adjustes your run. Is that why, this is obviously the broad jump, but Luz Long, I noticed he does this sort of like hitch in his leg before he starts running.
Is that what the giddy up is?

Speaker 32 Yeah, it's like a dance.

Speaker 32 It's like a preparation. Can you show us what your giddy up was? Well, it's like a one, two, three, four, five.
Then you start your run. Yeah.
And I taught it to Willie Banks. Uh-huh.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 32 World record. Taught it to

Speaker 32 Mike Powell. World record.

Speaker 32 We gave it a shot on the track where, at the very same time, actual Olympic athletes were practicing for this year's games. Was it embarrassing? It was mortifying.
Did we set a world record?

Speaker 32 Not even close. Did we become friends with any Olympians? They were otherwise occupied.
But this is the kind of dedication that deep historical investigations demand.

Speaker 32 What was, did Jesse Owens have to get he up? No, he had a stay on start because he was a sprinter.

Speaker 32 You see? Yeah.

Speaker 32 That's why he was losing the steps all the time. He didn't have a jiggle.
Well, he didn't have a jiggle. No, he didn't have a jiggle or a giddy up.
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 32 And it took his competitor to say, man, come on, you gotta do something first.

Speaker 32 Jesse Owens' competitor, facing down the pit, the Reichsportfeld,

Speaker 32 Lutz Long.

Speaker 32 Lutz Long was Germany's champion broad jumper, Hitler's champion, and he looked the part. A fine aquiline nose, framed by your classic blonde hair and blue eyes.

Speaker 32 As Owens wrote later, Hitler was in the stadium that morning to watch. Owens knew that he'd like nothing better than to see a black man lose to an Aryan.

Speaker 32 The thought was nagging at him, messing up his focus. And then he'd looked up at the box where Hitler had been watching the games and saw that when Owens' turn came, Hitler had just left.

Speaker 32 It made his blood boil.

Speaker 32 That's why he was fouling out. He was psyched out by all of it, distracted.

Speaker 32 And when he saw how amazing Lutz Long was at the broad jump, he began to wonder if there was something true about all this Aryan stuff.

Speaker 32 He was down to his last jump. And then came the miracle.

Speaker 32 In an autobiography he published in 1978, Owens wrote, Suddenly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Lutz Long.

Speaker 37 Look, there is no time to waste with manners. What has taken your goat?

Speaker 32 Obviously, we had to reenact this.

Speaker 37 I had to smile a little in spite of myself, hearing his mixed-up American idiom.

Speaker 37 Ah, nothing, I said. You know how it is.
He was silent for a few seconds.

Speaker 37 Yes, he said finally. I know how it is, but I also know you are a better jumper than this.
Now, what has taken your goat?

Speaker 37 I laughed out loud this time, but I couldn't tell him, him above all. I glanced over at the broad jump pit.
I was about to be called.

Speaker 37 Lutz didn't waste words, even if he wasn't sure of which ones to use.

Speaker 37 Is it what Reichanse Hitler did?

Speaker 32 He asked.

Speaker 37 I was thunderstruck that he'd say it.

Speaker 32 I...

Speaker 37 I started to answer, but I didn't know what to say.

Speaker 32 I see, he said.

Speaker 37 Look, we'll talk about that later. Now you must jump, and you must qualify.
But how? I shot back.

Speaker 37 I have thought, he said.

Speaker 37 You are like I am. You must do it 100%,

Speaker 11 correct?

Speaker 37 I nodded. Yet you must be sure not to foul.
I nodded again, this time in frustration. And as I did, I heard the loudspeaker call my name.
Lutz talked quickly. Then you do both things, Jesse.

Speaker 37 You remeasure your steps, you take off six inches behind the foul board, you jump as hard as you can, but you need not fear to foul.

Speaker 37 All at once, the panic emptied out of me like a cloudburst.

Speaker 32 Owens jogged up to the line and laid a towel to mark where Long had told him to jump. He lined up on the runway.
Maybe wiped his hands on his jersey.

Speaker 32 And then he ran. One step, two steps, closer and closer to the pit.
And then he hit that mark on the towel, leapt into the air. And when he finally got that, he qualified.

Speaker 32 And later that day, with Hitler back in the stands, in the medal event itself, world record, he set an Olympic record.

Speaker 32 And that's when Lutz Long, the Aryan poster child who had just lost to Jesse Owens, hugged him in front of Adolf Hitler. And the Hitler was pissed, man.

Speaker 32 But Long didn't just embrace him. According to Jesse Owens, later that night, they met up in the Olympic village.

Speaker 32 The hours ticked on, and they stayed up late talking about their lives, the state of the world, and the uncertain future.

Speaker 32 Some kind of strange bond had been formed between the men that day, because then the next day, they did it again. And after that, Again, and again, and again.

Speaker 32 Every single night of the games, they met up to talk. They became friends.
The dream of the Olympics was real for them. They bridged an unbridgeable gap between two cultures, two races.

Speaker 32 Something unbreakable had bound them. After the Games, when Owens was back in America and Lutzlong was still in Nazi Germany, they wrote letters to each other.

Speaker 32 Even after Long was serving in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army, back and forth across the Atlantic, for years, they kept coming coming until right before Lutzlong was killed in the war.

Speaker 32 He was stationed in the deserts of North Africa. On some lonely desert hour, he sat down to write one last letter to his friend.

Speaker 37 I am here, Jesse, where it seems there is only the dry sand and the wet blood.

Speaker 37 I do not fear so much for myself, my friend Jesse. I fear for my woman who is at home and my young son Carl, who has never really known his father.

Speaker 37 My heart tells me, if I be honest with you, that this is the last letter I shall ever write.

Speaker 5 If it is so,

Speaker 37 I ask you something.

Speaker 37 It is something so very important to me. It is, you go to Germany when this war done, someday find my Carl, and tell him about his father.

Speaker 37 Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when we were not separated by war.

Speaker 37 I am saying,

Speaker 37 tell him how things can be between men on this earth.

Speaker 32 If there are tears in your eyes, you would not be alone. This story is a big part of the legend of Jesse Owens.

Speaker 32 If you look up Jesse Owens in the Encyclopædia Britannica, there's the story.

Speaker 32 When they made a star-studded Hollywood film about Jesse Owens' life, Lutzlong and that qualifying jump are the pivotal moment.

Speaker 32 Retelling this story would help launch the career of the greatest Olympic documentarian of all time, Bud Greenspan.

Speaker 32 And I'm not an auctioneer, but I think it is the reason why Lutzlong's silver medal sold for nearly half a million dollars two years ago.

Speaker 32 about five times the amount earned for any other silver medal at auction. It's arguably the most important story in Olympic history.
It is proof of the Olympic dream.

Speaker 32 It made the case that it was good that America went to the Berlin Games because it made possible this improbable friendship that transcended even the Second World War.

Speaker 32 A story that was

Speaker 32 just too good to be true.

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Speaker 32 This entire series, we've been telling stories about the way people made sense of having the Olympics in Nazi Germany.

Speaker 32 The distortions, the myths, and when I kept hearing about Jesse Owens' friendship with Lutz Long, I thought, we got to do an episode on this.

Speaker 32 Here's two people who saw each other clearly through all that moral fog.

Speaker 32 So I wanted to read more of what Owens and Long wrote to each other in those letters.

Speaker 32 I wrote to the Jesse Owens Archive at the University of Ohio for copies of the letters, and they didn't have any. They suggested I write to the family, but they didn't have any either.

Speaker 32 It seemed strange to me that no one had kept them. So then I thought, maybe I'm just looking in the wrong country.

Speaker 40 My name is Galindor.

Speaker 40 I was living in Leipzig and working in Leipzig for more than 30 years and the last 25 years as the director of the sports museum in Leipzig.

Speaker 32 And Leipzig has a connection to Long's life, right?

Speaker 40 That's right.

Speaker 40 Lutzlong was born in Leipzig, 1913,

Speaker 40 and he lived there

Speaker 40 almost till the end.

Speaker 32 Rohr and her colleague, the sport historian Volker Kluge, have looked more deeply into the Jesse Owens Lutzlong story than anyone else.

Speaker 40 We got a lot of questions from all over the world about the legend.

Speaker 32 Jesse Owens told this story a lot of times. There are a few different versions, but Rohr dug through the official reports about the games.
They're over a thousand pages long.

Speaker 40 There is a very good

Speaker 40 documentation about the Olympics called Official Report of the 1936 Olympics, and they describe it very exactly what happens and where.

Speaker 32 Alongside that official report, the most important bit of documentary evidence is an article Kuga turned up, written by Lutzlong himself.

Speaker 32 It was published about a week into the games, and it's called Mein Kampf mit Oens, My Struggle with Owens, which I suspect is a deliberate reference to Hitler's memoirs.

Speaker 32 But homages to Hitler aside, the article was part of the surprisingly positive press coverage in Germany about Jesse Owens' win, including a series of photographs of Jesse Owens and Lutz Long lying together in the grass of the Reichsportfeld, smiling.

Speaker 32 The photos are sometimes billed as having been taken after the competition, when Owens won and Long hugged him. Long's wearing a dark turtleneck sweater, and it looks like he's cracking a joke.

Speaker 32 Owens is beaming at him and wearing his team USA crew neck. In the photo, they're so close, it almost looks like they're touching.
They look like real friends.

Speaker 32 So Gerlinda Rora and I turned our attention to that.

Speaker 40 So

Speaker 40 between

Speaker 40 the first three jumps and the final three jumps, these photographs were doing.

Speaker 32 Oh, so these photos are taken even before Jesse Owens wins the gold?

Speaker 40 Yes.

Speaker 32 Oh, wow. So it's even prior.

Speaker 32 There's a good chance that photo was taken or at least commissioned by Lenny Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker for the Third Reich. The photos float freely around the internet now.

Speaker 32 You can find them on Getty Images, but at the time, they were part of the Nazi propaganda push meant to show that the Nazis weren't as prejudiced as they seemed.

Speaker 32 So, we know that Lutz Long and Jesse Owens met at least for the time it took to take that photo, and they smiled at each other. Who knows what they said?

Speaker 32 But here's the strange thing:

Speaker 32 in his article, Lutz Long mentions Jesse Owens' difficulty qualifying. He describes each of the three jumps he took, but he doesn't say anything about helping him with the approach.

Speaker 32 Which is strange because that's the most important detail in the whole story. Owens is Long's biggest competitor.

Speaker 32 Owens is what stands between Long and the gold, and yet Long goes out of his way to help Owens get to the final. You would think in an article about the Olympic Spirit, Long would mention that.

Speaker 32 They were trying to prove that they were unprejudiced. Also, in Nazi Germany, it would have been a way for an Aryan to take credit for a black man's success.
But he doesn't mention it.

Speaker 32 Okay.

Speaker 32 So maybe all the meaningful stuff happened in those long talks in the Olympic village. What about those?

Speaker 40 I even think that it cannot be because Lutz Long didn't live in the Olympic village.

Speaker 32 Oh, really?

Speaker 40 He didn't live here.

Speaker 40 I know from his family and from photographs and from

Speaker 40 a diary of his mother that after the opening of the Olympic Games, he went back home from Berlin to Leipzig.

Speaker 32 And did he go home to Leipzig after the broad jump?

Speaker 32 He would go home at the end of each day?

Speaker 40 No, not each day.

Speaker 40 After his competitions started, he lived in Berlin in another hotel.

Speaker 32 All right. So the long talks seem less likely, though there are two pieces of evidence that cut the other way.

Speaker 32 First, a few days after the broad jump, a Newswire service wrote that, quote, something like a Damon and Pythias friendship has sprung up between Lutz Long and Jesse Owens, though I think that's just a reference to the hug on the field that all the reporters would have seen.

Speaker 32 But then, there's an athlete who, decades after the games, claimed that she went out drinking in Berlin with Owens and Long.

Speaker 32 But Volker Kluge thinks the timing of her story is implausible implausible given her event schedule. Also, I can't find any record of it in Owens' Olympic diaries.

Speaker 32 Owens is on the record saying, quote, I didn't get a chance to go out of the Olympic village. In fact, I never did leave the village.

Speaker 32 The only time that I was ever out of the village was at the time when we went to the Olympic Stadium to compete. I mean, they had some intense schedules to keep.

Speaker 32 Actually, even Hitler couldn't keep up with their schedules. The Führer liked to sleep late.
He famously slept through a lot of D-Day.

Speaker 32 And probably for the same reason, he wasn't even in the stands the morning of the bra jump qualifiers, which is why it's not actually possible that he walked out on Owens.

Speaker 32 That leaves us with the letters.

Speaker 32 So then the final piece of the legend

Speaker 32 is these letters, these sort of beautiful letters that Litzlong writes to Jesse Owens from the front,

Speaker 32 from the battlefields of the war. And I have not been able to find any archival record of those letters.

Speaker 32 Have you?

Speaker 40 I asked his widow when she was living still in Hamburg, and

Speaker 40 she said

Speaker 40 there weren't letters

Speaker 40 we got

Speaker 40 to our address, and she never saw a letter. from Jesse Owens.

Speaker 40 No one in the family knows

Speaker 40 about letters from Jesse Owens to Lutz.

Speaker 32 Owens at one point cites 1939 as the date of Lutz Long's last letter. He says that in it, Long writes about his wife and son.

Speaker 32 But Volker Kluge points out that Long didn't even marry his girlfriend until 1941. And by the way, his son wasn't born till then either.

Speaker 32 And okay, well, then there's that other account featuring a letter from Long on the front lines of North Africa after he was married and after his son was born.

Speaker 32 Except he didn't serve in North Africa, he died in Sicily.

Speaker 32 Also, you couldn't even send letters from the Nazi front lines to American citizens. I mean,

Speaker 32 they were fighting a war against each other.

Speaker 32 So then they really wouldn't have been speaking really beyond the competition itself. So probably the moment they spoke was when they were taking those photos.

Speaker 40 The only time

Speaker 40 they met each other was during the long jump competition in the stadium.

Speaker 32 The only time.

Speaker 40 Never before and never after.

Speaker 32 I looked through Jesse Owens' diary from the 1936 Games. In the back, he keeps a list of addresses, presumably of people he wants to write to.
And there's no address for Lutz Long in there.

Speaker 32 It was starting to look like this amazing Olympic story just wasn't true.

Speaker 32 But then I was left with a new question. If it's not true, how did it catch on?

Speaker 32 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 42 What are the ingredients of a good Olympic story?

Speaker 35 Well, I mean, I would start with the mathematics of the games, which are tremendously appealing from a storyteller's perspective, which is that

Speaker 35 you have whatever, I forgot how many sports, 50, going on simultaneously with athletes from all over the world.

Speaker 20 So you have an infinite number

Speaker 35 of stories to choose from.

Speaker 32 Like a farm system. It's a farm system.
Storytelling.

Speaker 27 So every year, a different one bubbles up.

Speaker 36 You know, Mark Spitz, a dentist, wins seven golds.

Speaker 35 Nadia Komenic, a kind of beautiful waif from Romania. It's this kind of wonderful, natural experiment in myth-making.

Speaker 25 It just has

Speaker 35 an enormous strategic advantage over the other big sports spectacles, World Cup, Super Bowl.

Speaker 31 Those are monocultures.

Speaker 42 Yeah, I think that's totally true. And like in the myth-making thing, you have this ancient aura to it.

Speaker 32 Yes.

Speaker 35 The other thing is it's this playground

Speaker 32 for

Speaker 35 healthy prejudice. So the

Speaker 35 flying fin, the kind of mysterious Pavunurmi who comes from like the woods of

Speaker 35 and like, you know, Abibi Bequila running barefoot through the streets of Rome to win the marathon in 1960. Of course, he's barefoot, right?

Speaker 38 He's Ethiopian, right?

Speaker 21 On and on,

Speaker 35 you take on the characteristics of

Speaker 35 your country. And that's like, it's this kind of really fun exercise in um uh multicultural ethnocentrism right it's like what's what's in the water over there yes

Speaker 42 that's right did you ever cross paths with bud greenspan no

Speaker 32 bud greenspan the most legendary olympic storyteller of all time there are those who believe in the core values of the olympics

Speaker 43 No one more so than filmmaker Bud Greenspan.

Speaker 32 At some point in this project, I got a little distracted from Jesse Owens and got obsessed with Bud Greenspan.

Speaker 32 He looked like the Buddha, if the Buddha had been born far-sighted on the upper west side of Manhattan.

Speaker 32 He was bald and typically wore his black, thick-framed glasses on top of his head, like his brain was stargazing.

Speaker 1 Do you ever look at that unappealing, negative side of the Olympics in your films?

Speaker 44 I've been asked that many times, Gene. I think I'd rather spend 100% of my time on the 90% that's good than a lot of my colleagues who spend 100% of the time on and the 10% that's not so good.

Speaker 32 Here, I should just acknowledge that he's talking about us in our nine-part series on Hitler's Olympics, which, to be fair, I defer to him, because Bud Greenspan basically invented modern, uplifting Olympic storytelling.

Speaker 32 When Bob Costas, the voice of the Olympics on NBC, first got the big job, you watched like 16 hours of Bud Greenspan documentaries. Just to get the feeling right.

Speaker 43 Though criticized at times for looking at the games like a young boy through rose-colored glasses, he has been making films on the Olympics for over 50 years.

Speaker 32 That, by the way, is from an ESPN tribute to Bud Greenspan, which is why there's all those angelic voices in the background. Greenspan started reporting on the Olympics in the late 1940s.

Speaker 32 He was at every single Olympic Games from 1984 until he died in 2010. He won eight Emmys, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild.
Everyone knew Bud Greenspan.

Speaker 32 And even if you don't know his name, you know his style.

Speaker 45 Here's one story.

Speaker 32 Nancy Beffa, Bud Greenspan's partner in life and film.

Speaker 45 Okay, we're at the Metropolitan Opera, which he adored, and intermission and having a glass of champagne.

Speaker 45 And managing editor of Time Magazine, you know, comes up to us and he goes, Bud, and he goes, what are you doing here?

Speaker 45 As if, you know, oh, you should be at Yankee Stadium or something.

Speaker 32 So there is something so operatic about Olympic stories.

Speaker 45 Well, yeah.

Speaker 32 So why am I telling you about Bud Greenspan? Because his love for sport and his love for operatic storytelling came together in the holy grail of all Olympic stories. The 1936 Games and Jesse Owens.

Speaker 45 They were friends. So like when Jesse would come into New York, maybe he stayed at his apartment.
They'd certainly see each other.

Speaker 45 I remember Bud telling me stories about how he would take Jesse out to dinner and maybe it was like a tennis or racquet club in New York City and they were still segregated, but he talked his way into the dining room and I remember the matrix told Bud, just as long as Jesse sits with his back to the door, the front door.

Speaker 32 In the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, Greenspan got the idea for a film that fit the era.

Speaker 32 He convinced Jesse Owens to return to Berlin to shoot an hour-long TV documentary, to narrate it too.

Speaker 32 A lot of the film is made up of archival footage that Lenny Riefenstahl shot of the games, but it's framed with these scenes of an older Jesse Owens in a suit walking around the Reichsportfeld.

Speaker 32 And for one of the film's pivotal scenes, Bud Greenspan invited Lutzlong's son Kai to meet Jesse Owens on the track. And that's when this happened.

Speaker 32 Kai, you probably don't know it, but your father was greatly responsible for my winning the broad jump in 1936.

Speaker 32 Well, Jesse, you've been a very important part in my life, and I've very often seen pictures from you and the photographs of my father.

Speaker 32 Please tell me about this competition here in the stadium, because I have, my father, only seen for three times.

Speaker 46 I was born in 1941, and my father died in 1943. Well, it all happened on the other side of the field here, where we had the preliminaries for the running broad jump.

Speaker 46 And on the first two jumps, I fouled on one and didn't go far enough on the other.

Speaker 46 And your father came to my assistance, and he helped me measure a foot back of the takeoff board, and he held the tape until I measured a foot back as far as my takeoff was concerned.

Speaker 46 And then I came down and I hit between these two marks, and therefore I qualified, and that led to the victory in the running broad jump.

Speaker 32 The film was a huge hit, and it was written, directed, and produced by Bud Greenspan. So I figured case closed.

Speaker 32 Greenspan took that hug on the field, and he just made up the rest of the myth about Luce Long.

Speaker 32 But Nancy Beffa said, not so fast. Bud Greenspan believed that story because he'd heard it from Jesse Owens.

Speaker 45 But going back, why did he make it up?

Speaker 32 I don't know.

Speaker 45 I can't really speculate on that particular thing. But obviously, you need a storyteller and then a recipient.
So

Speaker 6 people must have

Speaker 45 wanted to hear that story, you know, and the notion, I mean, so I don't know. And Bud, I mean, most important thing was until he died,

Speaker 45 didn't know that Jesse made up that story.

Speaker 32 The story came from Jesse Owens, and he'd first told it long before he made that film in the 1960s. Kai Long had first heard it from Jesse Owens, too, a decade earlier.

Speaker 40 When I first

Speaker 40 talked to Kai Long, he said

Speaker 40 for him it

Speaker 40 was a completely unexpected situation.

Speaker 32 Again, sport historian Kerlinda Rohr.

Speaker 40 He was 10 years at the time when Jesse Ogens came to Germany and suddenly Kai Long

Speaker 40 was in

Speaker 40 a lot of journalists and photographs and

Speaker 40 he didn't

Speaker 40 know what happened because he couldn't remember his father. He was only two and a half years old when Lutz Long

Speaker 40 had to leave the family for the war. And so

Speaker 40 it was a completely

Speaker 40 new situation for this young boy. Of course, he believed it because he didn't know what really happened.
He couldn't ask his father never.

Speaker 32 Girlinda told me that as Kai Long grew older and reporters kept asking him about Jesse Owens and his father, Kai started to wonder about the myth, which eventually had begun to involve Kai too.

Speaker 32 In a TV interview, Owens said that Kai had his letters to Lutz in a scrapbook.

Speaker 34 In 1951, I had the privilege of meeting his son, and after showing the pictures and letters that he had of the scrapbook that I had written his father. Well, as a result of that, today I have known.

Speaker 32 There is no evidence that that's true. Kai published a book in 2015 about his father full of family photos and documents.
It's in German and impossible to find, but the publisher sent me a copy.

Speaker 32 And there are just no letters from Owen Stallong in it. Surely if Kai had those letters in that scrapbook, he'd have included them in this book.

Speaker 40 And

Speaker 40 so he started to think

Speaker 40 about what's the truth and what really

Speaker 40 when he was an adult.

Speaker 40 And he was asked all the time from journalists. And when he

Speaker 40 told them, oh,

Speaker 40 maybe it couldn't be, or there are armed letters, to me he said, I can tell

Speaker 40 what I want.

Speaker 40 They want to hear the legends.

Speaker 40 And

Speaker 40 so

Speaker 40 he said once to me,

Speaker 32 oh, Mrs.

Speaker 40 Rohr,

Speaker 40 isn't it nice for people

Speaker 40 to live with this story?

Speaker 40 Do you want to destroy this story?

Speaker 32 Honestly, I don't want to destroy this story. And let me say again, a meaningful part of it is clearly true.
Lutzlong and Jesse Owens were true sportsmen. They were good to each other on the field.

Speaker 32 But this whole series we're doing is about what happens when we fail to see the truth of what is right before our eyes.

Speaker 32 And this legend of the Owens-long friendship has started to seem to me like one of the biggest examples of failing to see what's right before you. First, because in so many ways it doesn't add up.

Speaker 32 And second, because it doesn't just involve one or two Daffy members of the IOC, but so many of us. For a long time now.

Speaker 32 But why would Jesse Owens make this up?

Speaker 32 The truth, at last, next week.

Speaker 32 Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Natifaffrey, Dolly Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix.

Speaker 32 Fact-checking on this episode by J.L. Goldfein.
Original scoring by Luis Guerra. mastering by Sarah Breguerre and Jake Korski, engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 32 Special thanks to Karen Shikurji, Rufus Wright, who read the excerpts of Jesse Owens' autobiography, and J.D. Landis.

Speaker 32 I'm Ben Natovafrey.

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