Games of Deception: Chapters 19–25

“Bands play German national hymns and a hundred thousand zealots...stretch out their arms and sing,” reported Matthew Halton of the Toronto Star.

“Something like religious ecstasy, rather than...sporting enthusiasm, is the spirit abroad here today.”

“I have an idea these Olympic Games will have repercussions that will not help toward the amity of nations as they are supposed to. There will be dark trouble clouds along the horizon. They may develop into thunderstorms.”

“I have an idea these Olympic Games will have repercussions that will not help toward the amity of nations as they are supposed to. There will be dark trouble clouds along the horizon. They may develop into thunderstorms.”

Polish diplomat Józef Lipski shared a similar concern: people who could be so well choreographed for a sporting event could also be mobilized just as smoothly for war.

While the sixteen days of the Olympic Games provided a temporary respite from the most egregious acts of anti-Semitism, it was no secret that the Nazis were preparing to unleash a new round of terror once the Games were over.

While the sixteen days of the Olympic Games provided a temporary respite from the most egregious acts of anti-Semitism, it was no secret that the Nazis were preparing to unleash a new round of terror once the Games were over.

In his private box adjacent to Nazi leaders and dignitaries, American novelist Thomas Wolfe jumped out of his seat, screaming with joy.

Perpetuating the idea that Owens alone shined not only robs others of their due but leaves the impression that African American greatness at the ’36 Games was an exception rather than the rule.

In the minds of legions of detractors, there was no way for black people to win; the truth didn’t matter.

Stereotypes and hate were so deeply ingrained that any fact or fiction could be used to confirm them.

“The best the Nazis have been able to do with the racial problem created by Jesse Owens & Co is to theorize that these represent a race of American helots, more nearly akin to the panther and the jack rabbit than to their Aryan competitors,” he wrote.

Either way, sports had provided a venue for a breach in ethics and fairness.

White teammate Babe Didrikson, often lauded as the first superstar American female athlete and therefore a champion for women's rights, poured a pitcher of cold water on Stokes and black teammate Tidye Pickett on the train to LA.

Four-tenths of a second too slow, he lived out the rest of his life in obscurity.

“And thus a contest that drew the largest crowd in history,” lamented the New York Herald Tribune, “was played out to the most colossal indifference any baseball game has ever known.”

Teams from twenty-one nations had arrived in Germany to play a game that would not have existed if not for Naismith's ingenuity.

Naismith's journey to Europe was made possible by his protégé and the man who had worked hardest for basketball’s inclusion in the Olympic Games, Kansas coach Phog Allen.

Allen convinced fellow members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches to organize a “Pennies for Naismith” campaign in the winter of 1936, with high school, collegiate, and AAU teams earmarking one cent of each ticket sold during the week of February 9–15 for Naismith's travel fund.

“Germany not only builds up its youth physically, but in the process instills in them a national spirit,” he wrote.

Four of the twelve tree-lined outdoor courts had been modified to accommodate the debut of Olympic basketball, with temporary wooden backboards erected on the endlines and a layer of loam (a mix of sand, silt and clay) worked into the red clay courts to provide a harder surface supposedly impervious to rain.

Naismith showed up expecting a guest pass courtesy of the American Olympic Committee, but his name could not be found on the list. It was no oversight, but an intentional decision on the part of Avery Brundage and his staff.

This slight by American Olympic officials was compounded by the fact that the German hosts, who considered basketball a peripheral sport at best, paid no mind to Naismith, nor had they planned any sort of ceremony to welcome the game of basketball into the Olympic lineup.

The rules were antiquated by American standards, with no center-court line, a jump ball after each made basket, and no ten-second rule for crossing half-court or three-second rule for standing in the free-throw lane.

Still, Estonia was considered the best team in Europe and many expected them to give the U.S. team a good game. Instead, it was a rout from the beginning, with the Americans taking a 26–7 lead at halftime.

Ever the flamboyant showman, Gene Johnson was forced to grin and bear it when his Wild Men had to play their August 12 game against the Philippines in makeshift uniforms; his players’ red, white, and blue Spalding silks had been stolen out of their lockers the night before.

The Sure Passers (whom Gene Johnson derisively dubbed “The Humdrums”) limited the Mexicans to just two points in the first half, both coming on free throws.

The Sure Passers (whom Gene Johnson derisively dubbed “The Humdrums”) limited the Mexicans to just two points in the first half, both coming on free throws.

“The Nazi mentality, supposedly the apotheosis of detail and organization,” Balter concluded, “had misfired badly.”

Naismith despised slow play, and so did Coach Johnson, but the second half of the most significant basketball game in the forty-five-year history of the sport turned into one long, inept game of keep-away, with the Americans passing the ball back and forth just to run out the clock.

Balter considered the game a “hilarious travesty” with “hardly a recognizable pivot, dribble, jump shot, fast break, or anything else resembling basketball. The Big Game had been a Big Joke.”

First, he knew he was out of a job when he got back to Los Angeles, a galling reality considering he worked for the federal government.

The whole affair, he knew, had been one huge sales convention promoting the product of Nazism and its “byproducts of paganism, militarism, anti-Semitism and Fascism.”

The man who arrived in Berlin with no fanfare spent his last hours in the city celebrating a colossal achievement with friends, an Olympic wreath resting atop his head.

They enjoyed an array of spectacular entertainment: the Wallenda acrobats bounced off springboards and hung from ropes, ballerinas twirled, a cyclist performed tricks, and a band composed of members of a military unit known as the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler provided musical interludes.

His grandiose words sounded impressive.

On September 7, wealthy Jewish Germans were required to give the Nazis 25 percent of their assets, outright theft billed as a “deposit” to hedge against emigration.

“It’s a hell of a note to come back home with a world championship basketball team and have to disband it,” Johnson lamented.

“The field where the Olympic youth had once assembled, the buildings and monumental grounds that had once delighted the world, had become a deadly battlefield, revealing nothing but sickening remains and gruesome debris wherever one looked,” reported Carl Diem. “It struck me that not even the most fanciful poet could have imagined such a mad contradiction.”

On the other end of the ropes hung two Nazis, sentenced to death by an international tribunal following World War II for crimes against humanity.