ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 17, 1996 TAG: 9607170023
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: SAM MCMANIS
SOURCE: SAM MCMANIS
Sam McManis is a sports columnist for the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times.|
Around the breakfast hour, she sits at a table in one of Atlanta's most elegant hotels. She wears a tasteful pants suit, with a matching purse next to her, and her hands are arranged primly in her lap. She laughs easily, but not loudly, and spins elaborate stories from her youth with a deprecation that is as infectious as her drawl.
Alice Coachman is not merely another Southern woman of a certain generation. She may seem to fit the stereotype of the polite and demure Georgian belle, but she's surrounded at the table by journalists asking her to recount the bygone days of segregation, of the obstacles she had to clear to become the first American black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, in 1948 in the high jump, of the confusing mixture of celebrity and prejudice she experienced afterward.
Her life has been nothing short of extraordinary. Spend an hour around a coffee table listening to Coachman, 74, and you get a lesson in history, race relations, gender inequality and family values all delivered sweetly in a narrative absent of rancor or pedantic tones.
Though Coachman said she wonders why everyone wants to talk to her all of a sudden, since most of her exploits are decades old, never has her story been more timely. The Atlanta Olympics are only days away, and Coachman remains a link between Georgia's often-ugly past and its shining present as a modern city hosting the world for two weeks.
``I hope I can be there,'' Coachman said of Friday night's Opening Ceremonies. ``I hope I can get a ticket.''
If so, then it will be logged with all the other files in Coachman's database of memories that can be accessed merely by asking her.
Where to start is the most difficult choice, so Alice decided to start her story at the beginning, before she was born. She chuckles and says it is her father's story and that he swore to her it was true.
``During World War I, they were fighting in France,'' Coachman said. ``They had these wagons with mules and horses. The enemy line was coming to them and shooting. By shooting, they hit this mule.''
The mule, as Alice tells it, was split open at the belly, enabling Alice's father to hide inside while German troops swooped and looked for American survivors.
``When they got there, they thought they'd gotten everybody,'' she said. ``There was just this dead mule. If it hadn't been for that mule, I wouldn't be here.''
Apocryphal or not, it's a great story. But Coachman's other stories, ones she actually experienced, are no less gripping just because they are true.
She grew up in Albany, in rural Southern Georgia, as one of nine siblings. The whole Coachman family picked cotton on local plantations, earning 50 cents for every 100 pounds plucked. Her father occasionally traveled to Ohio to work as a plasterer because there were no jobs in Georgia, and her mother worked as a maid for white families.
Alice, an active girl, found time to channel her seemingly boundless energy into sports, even though blacks were excluded from all organized activities in YMCAs and schools. She and her friends simply made their own activities on the red clay dirt roads in town.
``We'd tie rags together and have somebody hold onto it on each side and jump over it,'' Coachman said. ``I was 9 or 10 when I first tried the high jump.''
The way Alice tells it, she was always a talented athlete.
``My mother always would send me on the errands because she knew I'd come back in a hurry,'' she said. ``I was fast. You had to run up and down the dirt roads. You went out there in the fields, too, where there was a lot of grass, but no track. No nothing.''
Not even shoes. When Alice first started high jumping in town, she did it barefoot. At 16, she broke the collegiate high jump record at a meet in Tuskegee, Ala. After that, Coachman received a ``working scholarship'' to the Tuskegee Institute, meaning she would clean the school's pool and sew uniforms in the morning and high jump in the afternoon.
Coachman was the best American high jumper over a seven-year period, but did not compete in the Olympics in either 1940 or 1944 because World War II canceled the Games.
``In '44, I was really ready,'' she said. ``But [in 1948] my back started hurting about three months before the Olympics.''
Not that it hurt her performance in London. Coachman edged Briton Dorothy Odam-Tyler to win the gold medal. Both women jumped 5 feet, 6 inches, but Coachman won because she cleared the height on her first attempt.
Back home, there was a parade for Coachman in Atlanta and another in Albany. At an official welcome at the town's auditorium, the audience was segregated - blacks on the left, white on the right - and Coachman was not allowed to speak. City officials wouldn't even let Coachman, supposedly the guest of honor, leave by the front door.
Outside of the South, though, Coachman was more warmly received. King George VI of England gave her the gold medal. She met Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt. Count Basie threw a party for her in New York.
Coca-Cola recognized Coachman's achievement. A Coke photographer showed up one day at the high school where Alice taught and took her picture for billboards she would share with Jesse Owens. Coachman is believed to be the first black woman ever paid to endorse a product.
None of which fazed Coachman nor changed her in the least. She sits serenely at that hotel table, surrounded by reporters, telling stories that resonate for a lifetime and wondering what all the fuss is about.
``I never thought,'' she said, ``I'd become famous for running track.''
LENGTH: Long : 104 linesby CNB