Games of Deception: Chapters 7–12

Without talented American athletes, the sporting events would be severely compromised; without American visitors and media coverage, the propaganda value of the Games squandered.

“It is necessary for the German Olympic Propaganda Committee to help me in creating favorable public opinion in this country to offset the large volume of adverse publicity.”

“Germans are not discriminating against Jews in their Olympic trials,” he falsely claimed. “The Jews are eliminated because they are not good enough as athletes. Why, there are not a dozen Jews in the world of Olympic calibre—and not one in our winter sports that I know of.”

In the end, to appease international critics, German fencer Helene Mayer, whose father was Jewish and mother Lutheran, was invited to compete for Germany, a suggestion proposed by American Charles Sherrill.

“It was hard for me to accept that within less than 60 seconds, the time it took to read the fateful words, my aspirations had been shattered,” she recalled.

There were no commercial endorsements at stake, no big paydays.

Forbidden relationships, social ostracism, economic strangulation, political powerlessness, a rigged legal system, racially motivated violence, ugly stereotypes, segregated athletics, second-class citizenship—it all sounded awfully familiar.

Children watched helplessly as men carrying guns and clubs accosted their mothers and fathers.

Black people were murdered by white mobs with impunity in the South—an average of one lynching every two weeks during the first three years of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt—and members of Congress bragged they would do nothing to curb the lawlessness.

American bigotry, whether focused on skin color or religion, was all connected.

This cloud of white supremacy hovered over the Olympic participation debate, hampering the boycott effort on two flanks.

Syndicated newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler recognized the element of hypocrisy inherent in condemnations of German anti-Semitism, writing that America’s own racism “causes the pointing finger of scorn to waver somewhat.”

When crafting the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which denied Jewish people their citizenship, the Nazis looked to U.S. law and culture for precedent and inspiration.

In crafting laws that pertained to immigration, citizenship, sex, and marriage, Nazi lawyers went looking around the world for precedent and found it, Whitman writes, in the United States.

While the Nazis weren’t overly interested in racial segregation as it was practiced in many parts of the U.S., there were aspects of Southern racism that were nearly indistinguishable from Nazi brutality.

For two decades, he toiled away at mundane jobs in the Midwest: store clerk, farmhand, bookkeeper.

In 1932, when his adopted hometown of Los Angeles hosted the summer Olympics, Germany (not yet under Nazi rule) was mired in the Depression and didn’t have the money to send a team to America.

Today we recognize AAU basketball as a circuit where top high school stars showcase their skills, but back in the 1930s, before the advent of professional basketball, the AAU was entirely different.

At age fifteen, he graduated from high school and was drafted by Major League Baseball’s Chicago White Sox. They offered him $50 a month to play minor-league ball. Balter said no thanks and enrolled at UCLA, where he acted in plays and wrote for the student newspaper, played intramural tennis and Ping-Pong, lettered in basketball for three years, and played baseball as a senior.

Balter loved playing sports as a kid, and he eventually created a popular national sports radio show that was a precursor to ESPN and SportsCenter.

It takes a lot to be noticed when you play your ball games amid the wheat and oil fields of central Kansas. And Gene Johnson, about as subdued as a peacock, yearned to be noticed.

While tens of millions of people suffered from unemployment, low wages, poverty, and hunger during the Great Depression, McPherson was one of the few areas of the country that avoided the downturn.

From the age of eight, he worked the family farm, cultivating the soil with a horse-drawn plow, picking cotton by hand, wrangling cattle.

Nothing illustrated Fortenberry’s strong-but-steady demeanor as a legend of West Texas more than one very brief boxing match.

A cocky fighter from Clayton, New Mexico, challenged eighteen-year-old Fortenberry to a bout, driving 150 desolate miles to Happy for the occasion.

A cocky fighter from Clayton, New Mexico, challenged eighteen-year-old Fortenberry to a bout, driving 150 desolate miles to Happy for the occasion.

“The tall tales of tall men were told by a short visitor,” wrote John Kieran of the New York Times, describing the coach as a “lively gent with a strong voice, curly brown hair, genial grin and rimless spectacles.”

The reason his players had such a hard time making baskets? They had never played on a court with glass backboards and found the Garden’s clear boards, designed so fans sitting behind them could see through, disorienting.

Though the Garden fans were up and out of their seats, screaming their heads off in support of the faltering hometown collegians, Fortenberry and Francis Johnson led a furious fourth-quarter rally, and the Refiners were victorious.

Eight teams arrived in New York for the Olympic qualifier, including the Refiners and Universals, the culmination of a national tournament open to teams from the AAU, NCAA, and YMCA.

For the players at Long Island University, the choice was more profound. As they debated whether to play, they considered questions of morality. Could they in good conscience compete for the U.S. team if that implied an endorsement of the Nazi regime?

Four hands went up in support of the boycott; all players left the locker room unanimous in the decision.

The movie studio itself was in such deep financial straits that Carl Laemmle, its founder, was forced to sell the company only a day before the New York tournament began.

Still others claimed that as a Jewish person, Goldstein decided to quit playing in protest of Hitler, insinuating that the studio bosses had convinced him to make that decision.

To the modern eye, something else was conspicuously absent from the proceedings in New York: African American players.

In fact, when UCLA’s Don Barksdale became the first African American Olympic basketball player at the 1948 Games in London, it came only after strenuous objections from some coaches and Olympic officials.

The Garden was the mecca of college basketball in the 1930s because of the wildly successful college doubleheaders staged there, with top teams traveling to the Big Apple to play local powerhouses such as City College of New York, New York University, and Long Island University—all schools with rosters full of Jewish players.

Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News dredged up several anti-Semitic stereotypes in explaining away Jewish basketball excellence, claiming the sport appealed to Jewish people because “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness.”

Regardless, even as the image of a solitary farm boy shooting at a hoop affixed to the side of a barn in Indiana, Kentucky, or Kansas took hold in the American consciousness, so, too, did the image of basketball as a city game, an avenue for hardscrabble kids to make good.

As expected, the Universals, despite all the upheaval within their team and at their employer's, made their way to the title game, easily beating the University of Arkansas (40–29) and the Wilmerding YMCA (42–29), while the Refiners escaped with a close win over Temple University (56–48) and crushed the University of Washington (48–30).