Team Canada_Tokyo Olympic Basketball Games Guide 1964
It was a far cry from years in the future when Canada embarked on a highly financed campaign to win a bevy of gold at the Vancouver Winter Olympics with their Own the Podium program.
In 1964, the basketball players on Team Canada paid their own way to Tokyo to compete in a qualifying tournament that took place a week prior to the start of the Tokyo Olympics. If Canada played well enough to finish within the top four in the 16-team tournament to qualify for the Olympic tournament, then the 15 players would be reimbursed for the S1,044 round-trip economy airfare from Toronto to Tokyo, according to a Yomiuri article from October 5, 1964.
On October 2, Canada got by The Philippines 68-64, which set up a match against Cuba. And on October 4 in Yokohama, Canada defeated Cuba 72-63. As the article describes, “Canada’s Olympic basketball team members are in the money, and far from keeping it quiet, they’re yelling their heads off jubilantly.”
Then there’s the adage “be careful what you wish for.”
After the opening ceremonies, and the commencement of the Olympics basketball tournament in the beautiful National Gymnasium Annex in Yoyogi, Team Canada quickly realized they had entered a slaughterhouse. Team Canada proceeded to lose seven games in a row.
To the delight of the hometown fans, Canada lost handily to a much shorter Team Japan 58-37, in what was considered at that time an upset. Japan in fact won 4 games in the tournament. Team Canada’s only consolation was in the consolation round, when they somehow defeated Peru 62-61, before falling to Hungary, and landing in 14th place out of 16.
Olga Fikotova Connolly is a five-time Olympian, and a gold medalist in the discus throw at the 1956 Olympics Games. Her romance and eventual marriage to Harold Connolly, four-time Olympian and champion hammer thrower at the same Melbourne Games is a shining part of Olympic lore.
In 1962, Harold, a teacher by profession, took the family to Finland when he accepted a Fulbright grant to teach English as a second language. Olga hoped to compete in her third Olympiad, at the Tokyo Games, but was consumed by family life, giving her little time to train and get in world-class condition. “My body was not in shape for discus throwing and my dream to compete in Tokyo began to seem unrealistic,” she wrote in a summary of events she had provided to a student researching the Tokyo Olympics.
But sometimes fate gives one a friendly push. Out of the blue, the Connolly’s were informed that officials representing the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee would visit them in Finland. And at the appointed time, “three superbly mannered gentlemen speaking flawless English visited our home.”
They told the Connolly’s of the committee’s plan to stage a large-scale rehearsal of the Olympics a year in advance (what was officially called The Tokyo International Sports Week). With warmth and smiles, the officials requested the participation of Harold Connolly in this competition because as they said, he was “truly one of the most respected competitors in the track and field throwing events and fully deserving of the honor.”
Harold and Olga Connolly at the Olympic Village in October, 1964.
The organizers were reported to have spent about USD one million to organize the Sports Week, a good chunk spent in recruiting and paying for the expenses of over 340 foreign athletes and officials to participate in this Olympic rehearsal. The fact that they visited certain foreign athletes to personally invite them is an act of extraordinary respect. And that respect was not limited to Harold Connolly, as Olga went on to write:
And so, I was pouring tea and offering pastry, and participating in the conversation, all that time having to exercise self- discipline not to show how much I would like see Tokyo also. However, the leader of the delegation noticed. When conversation slowed down, he reached his hand to me and said gently: “Naturally, Olga, you an Olympic champion; and, therefore, if your health permits we expect you also to participate in this pre-Olympic competition. We want you to visit Tokyo and be a part of this event”.
Overcome by his kindness, I could not keep my tears back, but had to speak the truth. “Thank you very much, but I am not in shape”, I said. “It would be charity that I cannot accept.” The officials laughed, spoke to one another for a moment and came up with a plan where I could travel to schools and exercise with kids, learn about them and they learn about me, because many have not ever seen a western woman athlete.”
So at the Tokyo International Sports Week, Harold Connolly competed in the hammer throw, and Olga Connolly visited schools. “Kids found me very tall and climbed up in my arms to touch my hair that was different than theirs. I answered multitude of questions through the interpreter, happily drank ocha at train stations, learnt to eat with hashi.”
And so, she was smitten with Japan, a spark reignited. Thanks to Sports Week, she was committed to the Olympic movement more than ever before, and happily made her return as a representative of the US track team in 1964 at the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Expect incredible drone shots of surfing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
One of my favorite toys as a kid was Verti-bird, a Mattel product from 1973 in which you operated a mini-helicopter to stop the bad guys. You had to control the helicopter’s lift and descent as well as speed, but it was connected to a wire so its flight was limited to a circular route.
But it was very cool!
Today, drones are the modern-day Verti-bird. This is a very weak comparison because drones today are in the middle of cutting-edge advancements in logistics, the military, security, news and sports coverage.
I remember talking with a photographer who covered the sailing events at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and he mentioned that it is hard for people unfamiliar with yacht competitions to show interest because of how hard it is to capture these competitions visually. Perhaps drones will change that.
Fox Sports made a commitment last year to provide broadcasts of golf and super cross using perspectives provided by drones. This has been made possible by adjustments to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) guidelines in the US, which now allows the use of drones for commercial use.
Because drones, when controlled by a skilled technician, can provide unique angles, particularly from above a stadium or an athlete, or close ups of athletes who are far from areas where cameramen or spectators watch.
Drones can currently move at speeds of 64 kph (40 mph). They can venture as far as 1.2 kilometers (.75 miles) away from the controller, which is a pretty wide berth. And battery life for a drone is about 20 minutes. These specs are true as of this writing, but I’m sure it’s already an outdated reality as this technology will advance rapidly.
Yes, there are fears that a drone will plop out of the sky and interfere with an athlete’s performance. People will point to the drone falling just behind a skiier at the Sochi Olympics. But the benefit, in terms of the birds-eye-view images and up-close perspectives in sports where such access was not possible, will outweigh the risk.
Expect to see incredibly creative use of drones at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Kanto Matsuri at the Tokyo International Sports Week_Mainichi Daily NewsOctober 1963
Hayes Jones was in Japan for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He had been to Japan before, but he had not quite mastered the local language. According to Sports Illustrated, he was getting food in one of the dining areas of the Olympic Village, and said to the Japanese working behind the counter one of the few words he had mastered.
“Hai.”
Why Jones, the winner of the gold medal in the 110-meter hurdles at those ’64 Games, was saying “yes” in order to get served, is unclear. But since he wasn’t getting served, he doubled down.
“Hai! Hai!”
As SI told it, “the Japanese responded immediately to this new American game. He laughed and said, ‘Hat! Hai!’ The two stood there shouting hais at each other over the counter until Jones finally said, ‘Hey, man, come on. Give me some salad!’ Instantly he was provided with enough lettuce and tomatoes for 10 men, which occasioned another round of hais, a few bows and a perplexed look on the part of the American.”
There is no dishonesty in saying that in Japan in 1964 the number of people who could speak English was relatively low. Organizers knew that in 1963, in the aftermath of the so-called “pre-Olympics”, a week-long rehearsal in preparation of the real Olympiad to be held exactly a year later. The feedback regarding the interpreters available was harsh.
Apparently, the organizers of the officially named Tokyo International Sports Week (TISW) had recruited interpreters from local universities and overestimated their abilities. The fact that the organizers provided the students with little training also contributed to the lack of readiness. This was particularly true regarding the students understanding of specialized sports jargon. Another issue was that the organizers limited their search to students who spoke either English or French, when in fact the athletes at Sports Week needed to be understood in Russian, German, French, Spanish or Italian for example.
Middle two are official interpreters
As a result of this feedback post-Sports Week, the organizing committee made a few changes:
They recruited an additional 140 interpreters who spoke Spanish, German and Russian.
They expanded their talent pool beyond universities, openly recruiting interpreters from the general public via examination. Seven thousand five hundred people applied in the ten-day registration period.
They ensured that 750 interpreters of the now five core languages of English, French, Spanish, German and Russian would be allocated to the Olympic Village, particularly in the transportation waiting areas and reception areas.
As national olympic committees (NOC) expressed a desire to bring their own interpreters, particularly of those languages not in the five core languages, the organizers decided to create a new category called auxiliary interpreters. They allowed an NOC to bring in one local language interpreter for every 30 athletes on the team. Over 200 auxiliary interpreters from 65 countries were given credentials for the ’64 Games.
In such a multi-lingual environment as the Olympics, people who spoke three or more languages were highly valued. The organizers did not have to recruit these specialists as apparently requests to volunteer poured into the office after the end of the 1960 Rome Olympics. The organizers ended up inviting 13 foreign multi-linguist interpreters, people who did not speak Japanese, but eventually were found to be very helpful in the press center and the Olympic Village.
Were there language issues at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics? Of course. Were these issues disruptive? Absolutely not, thanks to the efforts and preparation of the organizers and the diligence of the interpreters. Here is how the organizers summarized the performance of the interpreters at the XVIII Olympiad in their report, “The Games of the XVIII Olympiad Tokyo 1964 – The Official Report of the Organizing Committee“:
The preparation of the interpreters was completed early September, one month before the commencement of the Games. Beginning on 15th September, the day of the opening of the Olympic Village, 1,230 interpreters began their activities at their designated posts, whenever they were needed. Both men and women were uniformed differently from other personnel, in distinctive black doeskin blazer with white hemming, so that they might be easily recognized. There were perhaps occasions when the original plans and the practical results did not precisely coincide. As a whole, however, the young amateur interpreters recognized well the significance of the Olympic Games as a festival of youth, and was convinced that each one of them was in fact an ‘ambassador of goodwill’. With this conviction they made up for any linguistic efficiency. They laboured long hours day and night, they performed their duties well, without any incident worthy of mention.
Theirs was a significant role in the of the Olympic Games in Tokyo. The expenses defrayed by the Organizing Committee for the recruitment, training, and management of the services of the interpreters amounted to 150 million yen (US$416,666).
One of the many interpreters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics_Asahi Graf_Oct23_1964
Tokyo International Sports Week in October 1963_Mainichi Daily News
The Autumn sky was not clear and blue, but cloudy and gray. Most of the athletes were dressed up smartly, some in normal track suits. When the athletes marched into the National Stadium, there appeared to be huge gaps within and between teams, as opposed to the immensely dense succession of national teams usually expected on their heroic march at the commencement of an Olympic Games. And in this case, they marched past the Crown Prince, not the Emperor of Japan. The jets maneuvered and etched out the five rings of the Olympic emblem, but the circles weren’t quite right.
No one carried a torch into the stadium and lit an Olympic cauldron.
In fact, you couldn’t even see the word Olympics anywhere. This was not a sporting event sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), so no one could officially use the label “pre-Olympics”, which were what most people were calling the event.
But that was just fine. After all, this was not the opening ceremony of the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad, it was the opening ceremony of the Tokyo International Sports Week in 1963, exactly one year before the start of the actual Olympics.
Demonstrating the wisdom and extraordinary planning capability of the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee (OOC) in the early 1960s, they committed to running a dress rehearsal of the Olympics a year in advance. At a budget of USD1 million, the OOC organized a competition for 20 different sports, invited about 4,000 athletes from 35 different countries, including over a dozen world-record holders.
There were, of course, issues, according to the Mainichi Daily News.
At the yachting events in Hayama, the Thai team (led by a Prince Bira of Thailand) were regaled by the Costa Rican flag at the venue, which employs the same pattern and colors, but the colored stripes are in different orders.
The canoeing venue at Lake Sagami was too far away, the 4-hour bus ride a headache.
The shotput balls, which were manufactured in Japan, were apparently too small.
The high jumpers found the soft rubber clumps in their landing area to be unsafe, particularly after the world’s best female high jumper, Iolanda Balas, sprained her ankle in it after a jump.
The walls that provided back drop at the shooting site were brown, which caused eye strain, as opposed to yellow or gray which the shooters were more accustomed to.
Taxis were hard to get a hold of at the stadium.
And most prominently, the interpreters on site were not effective.
All of which proves why it was so important to have a rehearsal, so that the organizers could note potential issues when the real Games come to town. Perhaps more significant, a major objective of the Tokyo International Sports Week was to infuse confidence in the organizers, the IOC and probably the entire nation of Japan – after all, there was some doubt that Japan could pull off the first Olympic Games in Asia.
Iolanda Baras complained of the landing area at TISW_Mainichi Daily News_October 1963
After the completion of the dress rehearsal, any doubt disappeared. The 7-day Tokyo International Sports Week was a success.
According to Sports Illustrated, over 20,000 police and over 1,200 firemen were mobilized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government during the Sports Week. And when the 68,000 spectators spilled out of the National Stadium at the end of the Opening Ceremony on October 11, 1963, it reportedly took only 18 minutes to do so (which is mindboggling), and about 50 minutes to restore traffic to normal conditions around the National Stadium on a Friday afternoon.
Here’s how the Mainichi Daily News put it:
The criticisms from the foreign and Japanese delegations and press, in fact, came as a “blessing” to the Tokyo Olympic organizers, who had intended the TISW “actually and truly as a rehearsal or trial” and nothing more. The lessons they learned are to their advantage in preparing for next year’s Olympics. Reflecting and weighing the evaluations, good and bad, the OOC is rolling up its sleeves to remedy these flaws and to improve, whatever possible, on the countless details that need to be perfected by Olympic time next year. Many of the suggestions have already been accounted for. The Japanese have demonstrated that they have the ability to stage a big-scale sports festival by their splendid organization of the spectacularly successful Third Asian Games in Tokyo five years ago. And they can do it again. The world can be confident that the Japanese with their ingenuity and determined efforts and favored by experiences in the TISW will clear all hurdles successfully to realize their hopes and dreams to make Asia’s first Olympic Games the greatest ever held.
The pictures are the first two pages of photo profiles of Americans on the US Olympic squad, from the summary report of American performance at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. As you can see and likely understand, America at the time demographically was generally perceived to be white. But it was changing, as minority groups, be they black, latino or Asian for example, were growing in size. Consequently, their representation in American Olympic squads were also growing.
Note James Bregman’s head shot in the upper right-hand corner
In 1964, diversity and inclusion were not buzzwords in corporate America. They were in some ways an alien concept, something that you might only visualize if you happen to be passing through the United Nations when it was in session. But there was one shining example of that on Team USA in 1964 – the Judo team – represented by a Caucasian Jew (James Bregman), a person of Native American Indian descent (Ben Nighthorse Campbell), a Japanese-American (Paul Maruyama) and an African American (George Harris).
Judo is not a team sport. It is very much mano-a-mano, and while you learn from others, training can be done independently. In other words, in the case of the 1964 Team USA judo squad, their diverse make up did not necessarily contribute to their actual performance beyond the fact that they were all good friends, four of the few foreigners who ventured to the mecca of judo in Tokyo to live and train.
L to R: George Harris, James Bregman, Yoshihiro Uchida, Paul Maruyama, Ben Nighthorse Campbell
But for James Bregman, who won a bronze medal in the middleweight class at the 1964 Games, the “rainbow team” was an inspiration to him.
“I grew up in a black ghetto,” Bregman told me. “I was a Jewish kid with white skin who was picked on by black kids who were brutes. I actually experienced segregation. My father had a grocery store in Green Valley, Virginia, and we lived above it on the second floor. Behind our store was Drew Elementary School, only two blocks away. I could play basketball with the other kids there, but in the 1950s I couldn’t go to that school. Instead, they bussed me out to Fairlington Elementary School in a white neighborhood 30 minutes away.”
Bregman didn’t object to being bussed out – he said he really wasn’t conscious of the socio-economic context of race relations at that time. But he did know that he was beat up in his neighborhood. Very often the bullies would be black, but Bregman told me that he was brought up not to judge, that he should be respectful to everybody and that a few bad guys did not represent an entire group.
And yet, he was getting beat up nonetheless.
Bregman was a small boy, often sick, dealing with bronchitis and asthma as a child. His parents thought that keeping him active indoors would help, so he got lessons in baton twirling, tap dancing, gymnastics, acrobatics as a kid. But one day, his parents learned of a judo club in the officers’ athletic club at the Pentagon in Washington D. C. that also was open to the public. Bregman’s parents took him to the club and suddenly, he was hooked on judo. And the officer’s club was also eye opening, the closest he would come to being inside the United Nations.
Although the Officer’s Athletic Club was located in Virginia, it was not segregated since the Pentagon was the Federal Government’s military headquarters. You had black, whites, hispanics, Japanese, Chinese, people from embassies all over the world. The club membership was multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious. From the time I was 13 years old, those were the people I hung out with. Maybe it was subliminal, but it gave me an understanding that hatred based on these externalities was ridiculous.
In fact, what Bregman understood, as did his teammates on the US judo team, what brought them together was far more substantial than what set them apart. Harris, Campbell, Maruyama and Bregman had all trained together in Japan for 3 or 4 years, their tight friendship forged in the common experience of two-a-day training – relentless, punishing and exhausting training. According to Bregman, they were more interested in becoming waza-shi, or highly proficient in judo technique, than winning competitions.
Bregman felt that his team was the representation of an ideal America, a team built on merit and performance, not race or religion. “Being on the rainbow team had a tremendous impact on me personally. This team represented America, not the one I grew up in, but one I wanted to live in.”
There were no words in anger, no fists raised in threat. But in the world of sportsmanship, and more specifically in the gruff quietude of judo, the action of El Shehaby was akin to a slap in the face.
In Judo, there is an expectation of restraint and calmness, regardless of whether one makes the perfect throw or is body slammed in twisting agony, whether one wins or loses. When Anton Geesink shocked all of Japan by handily defeating Akio Kaminaga to win the gold medal in the open division of the 1964 Olympics, Geesink did not revel in his victory. In fact, right after the referee tapped his shoulder to indicate his victory, Geesink had to deal with an unexpected breach of etiquette by Dutch fans who sought to storm the judo mat in victory. He jumped to his feet and walked towards them, his right hand extended in a halt sign, and a hard stare stopped them in their tracks.
The two competitors then kneeled facing each other, getting their judo-gi in order in a matter-of-fact manner. They stood and bowed. Geesink walked up to Kaminaga impassively, but when he reached over to offer a small hug to his competitor, Kaminaga offered a smile of resignation and happiness for the other, which in turn gave Geesink permission to smile back in relief.
James Bregman and his brotherhood of judoka understood this interaction to be proper.
Bregman won the bronze medal in the middleweight class in judo’s Olympic debut at the Tokyo Summer Games of 1964. Some say, he should have had a shot at gold if not for a quick judgment call that went the other way.
Bregman (#5) throwing an opponent at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics_ from James Bregman’s personal collection.
Bregman had defeated Argentinian Rodolfo Perez to get to the medal round. He faced off against Wolfgang Hofmann of Germany for a chance at gold. Towards the middle of the match, Hofmann got Bregman in an arm bar, “an effective one” as Bregman put it. “He nearly broke my arm.” Bregman told me that he approached Hofmann with an uchimata, but Hofmann blocked it. Then Bregman performed a left ip-pon seoi-nage over the shoulder and threw Hofmann to the mat, but not for a full point. They rolled and Hofmann then got Bregman in an arm lock. Bregman was able to stand up and also got Hofmann off the mat.
According to Bregman, the rules of judo at the time stated that if a person is in an arm lock but is standing, and the person who is giving the arm lock is off the ground, then the referee is supposed to say “matte”, stopping the match briefly so that the judoka can re-set. And in fact, the referee did indeed say “matte“, which means “wait”. Hofmann either didn’t hear that, or ignored it, and continued with the arm lock. Bregman thinking his arm was about to break, tapped out and gave up. In that instant, the referee simply ignored the fact that he had said “matte“, and awarded the match to Hofmann.
“I’m like, ‘what'”, said Bregman. “I’m in a lot of pain holding my elbow walking off the mat. But in judo, you don’t say a word, you show no emotion, and you honor your opponent as a victor, in a gentlemanly fashion. And you accept the referee’s judgment.”
What was more important was how he was greeted by his colleagues at Meiji University, home of the toughest judoka in the world in the 1960s. “When I won the bronze, the Japanese judoka came over and congratulated me and hugged me. It was like Meiji had won a gold medal. They were ecstatic for me.”
Bregman and his bronze medal_from James Bregman’s personal collection.
It was October, 1964, the Olympics were in Tokyo, and the Japanese were expected to sweep their home-grown martial art. And in fact, Japanese took gold in three of the four weight-classes at the Tokyo Olympics.
American James Bregman won the bronze medal in the middle-weight class at the inaugural judo competition at the Olympic Games. His accomplishment was the result of years of training, as well as a dedication to mastering technique or “waza“, and being the best judoka he could possibly be. But it was never about winning a medal.
Bregman, like a handful of other determined foreign judoka in Japan, trained with members of Meiji University, the dominant judo power in the 1960s. Training at Meiji was what you might find in a judo dictionary as meaning “glutton for punishment”. But Bregman trained, learned, and was proud to become proficient enough to earn the respect of his Meiji comrades. “My sempai was the captain of the Meiji University team. And when he put his hand on my shoulder and called me a “waza-shi” (a technician), that meant more to me than a medal.”
Bregman remembers judo in Japan as being a meritocracy, where attitude, grace and technique were the measures of a person. He said that twice a year, there would be public and open competitions called “koh-haku shiai“, where any judoka could come and compete. They would line you up in terms of your level, from the beginners’ level of “sho-dan“, then to “ni-dan“, “san-dan“, and upwards. You could have a line of hundreds of judoka, and the process is the first person in line gets on the mat with the next judoka and has a go. Whoever wins, stays on the mat to take on the next guy, and the next guy. Sometimes, a person from a lower rank takes on a person from the next rank up and wins a match or two. But very often, judoka are in the right rank, getting that feedback real time in front of all to see.
Bregman told me that when he first started attending koh-haku shiai as a ni-dan, “you’re basically a flying machine” getting tossed all over the place. But as you train, you get better, and over time, you’re throwing people, and eventually beating people above you in rank. “It’s a real learning experience,” Bregman told me, “putting to test all the things you learned from your training.”
From the autobiography of Syd Hoare, “A Slow Boat to Yokohama”
One of his most impactful teachers was Bregman’s sempai, a judoka named Seki who was a year ahead of Bregman. He said he trained every day with Seki, who was third or fourth best in the middleweight class in Japan, learning the right way to stand, mat work, choke techniques, and mat presence, lessons that served him well in the Olympics. Bregman explained that Seki would train Bregman about mat presence by practicing near the “joh-seki“, a wooden floor where shrines were placed for special occasions. Since the joh-seki was hard, falling on it was something Bregman wanted to avoid.
It was hard enough thrown on the tatami, which are not exactly cushions. Even though we know how to fall, it hurts. What he was teaching me is that you have to be conscious of where the edges are, to have total mat awareness. You need to know where your opponent is going, and where you want to go. Most of us were taught to fight in the middle of the mat. This was due to the early rules of judo. If you go to the mat, and you stepped out, they brought you back after stopping the match, so throwing a person outside the mat was, in a way, wasted effort. So Seki taught me how to anticipate the other person’s move and maneuver him to where you want to go.
At the Tokyo Olympics, Bregman faced off against a judoka from Argentina named Rodolfo Perez. In the video, you can see Bregman pick up Perez’s right leg, putting him off balance. But Bregman notices that he is just about to push Perez off the mat, which would have stopped the match and resulted in no points. Noting where he wanted to go, Bregman planted his right foot at the edge of the mat, and while still holding Perez’s leg suspended, he turned the two of them nearly 180 degrees so that Bregman was facing the middle of the mat. Then with his left leg sweeping from behind, he tripped up Perez in a kosotogake. Perez fell safely in bounds and Bregman moved on to the semi-finals.
He wobbles. He quivers. He rolls. He shakes. He is a dripping mass of flesh, a monument to fat. He is 6 feet 3 and weighs 295 pounds. His waist is 44, his chest is 52, but sometimes in the heat of action the measurements seem the other way around. Sitting in the corner, he looks like a melting chocolate sundae.
That’s how Sports Illustrated described heavyweight boxer Buster Mathis in an article on the results of the US Olympic team boxing trials, held in May, 1964. Mathis, despite his bulk, was surprisingly athletic. There are pictures of him playing basketball, flitting about on roller skates and dancing. And his ability to move deftly around the ring, weaving and bobbing, led one reporter to say that Mathis “floats like a baby elephant and stings like a bee.”
In the finals of the heavyweight division at the Trials, Mathis took on another promising heavyweight named Joe Frazier. Frazier, the butcher from Philadelphia who would go on to be heavyweight champion of the world in the glory days of Ali and Foreman, was no match for Mathis. Here’s how SI described Frazier’s futile attempt to go inside.
Frazier was a solid 195, but Buster still had a 100-pound pulling the weights. And he had his speed. Instead of hunting for the head, Frazier moved in to pound Buster’s belly, which shook and glinted under the lights. Buster managed to keep Frazier at bay with a whistling left hook (each one thrown with a loud grunt, “uuuuunnnnhhh!”), and even when Frazier did manage to get inside, his punches were smothered by flab. As Pappy (Gault) says, “Buster’s got an extra layer of fat on that stomach that stops the punches.”
Mathis, not Frazier was heading to Tokyo. Until he wasn’t. On September 19, just three weeks before the opening ceremony of the Toyo Olympics, it was announced that Mathis had a broken bone in his hand – some say it was a finger, others a thumb. It didn’t matter – Frazier was asked to go in Mathis’ place. Ironically, it is said that Mathis broke the bone in his fight with Frazier, learning the unfortunate lesson that winning isn’t everything.
Frazier would go to Tokyo and win the gold medal in the heavyweight division. However, when he broke his thumb in a semi-final match, Frazier told no one. Clearly favoring his right, Frazier managed to win the finals on points.
After the 1964 Olympics, both Frazier and Mathis turned professional, and began winning streaks. When Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the American armed forces, in the midst of the war with Vietnam, he was stripped of his titles and his license to box in the US revoked. Suddenly, the heavyweight title was up for grabs.
On March 4, 1968, Buster Mathis with a record of 23-0, took on old amateur rival Joe Frazier, with a record of 19-0. Mathis had beaten Frazier not once, but twice preceding the Tokyo Olympics. And when the bell had rung ending the sixth round of the 12-round title fight, Mathis was ahead on points. But Mathis had never gone so deep in a fight with the ferocious and determined Frazier. While Frazier’s patented body blows had little effect over short fights, over a longer period of time, Frazier’s blows began to wear Mathis down. And then suddenly, towards the end of the 11th round, a lightning left-hook by Frazier crumpled Mathis.
Hard-luck Buster Mathis could not win. He lost his biggest shot at the title against Frazier in 1968. And in 1964, he beat Frazier in the Olympic Trials, and still loses his shot at the Olympic glory. If not for Frazier, he coulda been a champ. Twice.
Ben Nighthorse Campbell was a member of the first American team to compete in the fledgling judo competition at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In order to prepare for the Olympics, he moved to Japan to train, where he said he was the outsider, the newcomer. “You learn by watching and doing whatever the newbies did. I scrubbed uniforms, toilets. And they’re watching you. If you’re willing to do it, they treat you with respect.”
That’s not an easy thing to do – to subsume your ego for the greater good of your ultimate goals and earn the respect and assistance of others. Campbell told me most other Americans could or would not do so, and did not continue with their training in Japan, excepting two other Americans at Meiji on his Olympic squad: Paul Maruyama and Jim Bregman.
So many factors result in the seemingly random way successful people and leaders emerge. In addition to his high level of physical skills, Campbell’s emotional intelligence – his ability to show respect and humility in a new cultural milieu, to build relationships that will help him drive toward his and his colleagues’ goals – appears to be a key factor in the success he has had through his life. Campbell would serve in the House of Representatives and the US Senate for nearly 20 years. Broadly speaking, success is due to a mixture of skills, naturally gifted through DNA or developed through experience and effort, as well as circumstance and how one reacts to it.
While Campbell said that training in Japan was tough, in some ways, he had gone through even more challenging experiences as a child. He was the son of Albert Campbell who suffered from alcoholism, and of Mary Vierra, who had to live and work in a sanatorium much of her life due to her contraction of tuberculosis. Since his father struggled to find work, as did many during the Great Depression, and his mother could have only minimal contact with her children due to the contagiousness of her disease, both Ben and his sister Alberta Campbell had a nomadic childhood of foster homes and orphanages.
According to Campbell’s biography, Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior, the siblings grew up hungry, feeling abandoned, and had to negotiate the randomly rough relationships of life in the orphanage – situations ranging from disciplinary beatings and haranguing for not washing one’s hands to fear of sexual abuse. And because the orphanages would keep males and females separate, Ben and Alberta could not support each other as brother and sister during these complex emotional times.
Siblings Ben and Alberta, from the book Ben Nighthorse Campbell: An American Warrior
As it turns out, Ben and Alberta had different reactions to these trying times. At the age of 44, Alberta overdosed and died on a potent combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. Ben somehow found lessons of life in his childhood struggles, as noted in his biography.
Sadly Alberta seems to have crumbled under the same pressure that made Ben strong. Although the orphanage experience may have contributed to her destruction, Ben thinks he benefited in some ways, “‘That must have been so terrible,’ people always tell me, but as I look back on it I think it was one of the best things that happened to me. It made me very self-reliant and independent. If you have nobody to rely on, then you have got to do it yourself.”
These were not lessons that were learned over night. An underachiever in school who would have run-ins with the police on occasion, Campbell eventually learned after a 2-week stint in juvenile lock up that he needed greater discipline and direction in his life. Campbell was 17 when he decided to enroll in the United States Air Force, where he served in The Korean War, and sharpened his judo acumen.
But there was always an inner dialogue taking place within Campbell, a key ingredient in honing a potent emotional intelligence. After the Tokyo Olympics, Campbell began to more strongly identify with his native Indian roots. As he explained in his biography, his father was Cheyenne, a native Indian tribe based in the Great Plains of the United States. Native Indians were an oft-discriminated peoples, and so Campbell kept his Cheyenne connection quiet, revealing it to his son only in his love for making jewelry. But it became important for Campbell, the Olympian, to better understand who his ancestors were, and thus who he was.
Campbell learned of his connection to a family line named Black Horse, and developed a deeply personal relationship with the Cheyenne. As successful people do, he understood the story of his life, how he connected to the past, and his obligations to his people in the present and the future. His love of the outdoors and art was not a random interest but a connection to a culture he was ingrained within to a degree he was not conscious of until late in adult life.
Self awareness in leadership is key. Campbell’s coach on the US men’s judo team of 1964, legendary judoka Yoshihiro Uchida, believed that Campbell was inspired to understand his roots during his time in Japan, according to Campbell’s bio:
I believe the time he spent there was a period where he learned a great deal more about himself as an American and as a Native American, because only when confronted with another culture do you truly begin to question and appreciate your own heritage.
Campbell is retired from politics, but running a successful jewelry business and still in good health and expectant to return to Japan in 2020, as are his teammates from the men’s judo team. For a kid from California, who grew up without a home, he now has three, real and symbolic – one in Colorado, another in Montana where his of Cheyenne family reside, and a third in Tokyo, where years of hard work first began to blossom.
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