Sport: The Golden Boys

Deep down inside, the Californians did not feel that they needed the U.S. on their side in the Olympic games. They had a bumper crop of their own athletes. At Henley-on-Thames last week, the University of California’s smooth eight-oared crew got off to a slow start, but never had to raise the beat too high. The coxswain simply called for a “big ten” (increasing the effort, but not the beat, for ten strokes) and Cal smoothly spurted into the lead. California won easily over Great Britain’s Leander Boat Club and Norway’s Fana Row Club.

Its victory climaxed a long procession of California triumphs. Its girl divers. both talented and pretty, won first and second in every event; San Francisco’s Ann Curtis hung up a new Olympic record in the 400-meter swim. And in the individual track & field events, California’s golden boys really shone. They walked off with seven gold medals—two more than the Swedes, five more than the rest of the U.S. team. Had California competed on its own in track & field in London, the tally would have read: California 102, Sweden 98, the U.S. 77.

Peaches & Somersaults. To many of the Californians, who clung together like Englishmen in the jungle, London was a strange, provincial place. The men from the Coast bunked together four in a room, hit the chow line as a unit. For dates, they met California girls at Earl’s Court, a district halfway between Uxbridge and Southlands College (where the U.S. women’s Olympic team was quartered).

In Piccadilly one day, a giant (6 ft. 4 in.) California javelin thrower named Butch Likins decided to improve on the ineffective way a pushcart peddler hawked his peaches. Butch took over. His basso-profundo split the damp London air: “Ripe, juicy, California peaches! Buy your peaches here.” When the fruit was sold Butch turned the money over to the peddler, said, “Now, that’s the way they sell peaches in California.”

Next to London’s weather, the thing that bothered Californians most was the look on Londoners’ faces; to West Coasters they seemed vaguely uninterested in life. One night on a London bus, a Los Angeles miler turned a somersault and hung upside down from two straps. “It worked,” he boasted later. “Their mouths dropped open all the way down to their knees.”

Flags & Firsts. One evening after dark, a Californian (assisted by an outlander from the state of Washington) shinnied over the fence into damp and deserted Wembley Stadium. The only light they could see was the Olympic flame flickering in its great urn. They slipped past the guards, climbed up onto the roof and hauled down the large five-ringed Olympic flag, which waved above the royal box. Into a bag it went. Following it went some smaller flags—the British, Dutch, Panamanian and Italian. Then they escaped.

By the ethics of the underclassmen, the souvenirs belonged to them. For with California’s help, the U.S. had run up 662 points when the Olympic “permanent flame” went out last week after the dampest, most amicable Olympiad of the modern age. Next in line: Sweden 353, France 230½, Hungary 201½, Italy 183.

Basketball was born in the U.S., and the U.S. team played it as if nobody else knew anything about the game. A bad scare by Argentina (whom they barely nosed out 59 to 57) stopped that. The U.S. rolled over Egypt, Peru and Uruguay, before coming up against Mexico—the one nation expected to give them a tussle. In London last week, the Mexicans made a game of it until they ran out of breath against such court monuments as 7-ft. Bob (“Foothills”) Kurland, late of Oklahoma A. & M. After getting by Mexico, 71 to 40, the U.S. team toyed with the bewildered French in the Olympic final.