Sport: Tigerbelles for Rome

At the U.S. women’s Olympic track-and-field trials in Abilene, Texas last week, the most conspicuous onlooker was a chunky, intense young Negro with a pencil-thin mustache, who seemed to be all over the field. Between races, he paced the infield grass incessantly. At the finish line, hands clenched, chest thrust forward, his face a mask of rigid concentration, he pantomimed the runners breaking the tape. When the trials were over, the results were surprisingly good, and the credit belonged largely to 29-year-old Edward S. Temple, coach of Tennessee State University’s “Tigerbelles.”

No fewer than five Tigerbelles won berths on the squad that travels to Rome next month. And with them, as Olympic coach, goes Ed Temple who, almost singlehanded, has assured the U.S. of its best female Olympic representation since 1932, when the U.S., led by Babe Didrikson, swept all but one of the six women’s track-and-field events. Temple’s credo: “I tell the girls, if we’re gonna run, let’s run.

If we’re gonna be spectators, then let’s get up in the stands where we belong.” For Temple and his girls, the path to the 1960 Olympics has been paved with hard work and Spartan self-denial. Himself a Tennessee State sprinter until he hurt his leg, Temple took over as women’s track coach after earning his master’s degree in 1953 and set out to make it one of the college’s top teams. He scoured the South for promising sprinters, labored successfully to increase his allotment of athletic scholarships from two to ten. A mark of his progress: at Tennessee State, primarily a top-rank basketball school (national small-college champions in 1957-59), women’s track is now a major sport, men’s track a minor. Temple’s training methods are exacting. “We train the European way,” he says. “No play; just hard work.” In the months preceding last week’s trials, the Tigerbelles refused dates, dieted carefully, were up at 5 a.m. each day for exhausting, lengthy workouts, went back in the afternoon for another two hours of technique polishing.

Temple’s severe discipline has paid off.

His girls have won the national indoor and outdoor women’s championships for each of the past six years. At the trials, led by willowy Wilma Rudolph—who set a world record of 22.9 sec. in the 200-meter dash earlier this month—the Tiger-belles prompted Temple to the euphoric hope that the U.S. women might surprise the heavily favored Australians, Russians and British at Rome.

Sprinter Rudolph won both the 100 meters (11.5 sec.) and 200 meters (23.9 sec.), will anchor a 400-meter Olympic relay team composed exclusively of Tennessee State sprinters, is a good prospect for three Olympic gold medals. Tigerbelle Shirley Crowder, with an aiding wind, ¼tied the U.S. citizens’ record of 11.4 in the 80-meter hurdles, and Willie B. White, a former Tennessee State student, broad-jumped 20 ft. 4^ in. to break the U.S.

record. Record-cracking Olympic trial performances by Los Angeles Housewife Earlene Brown in the discus (176 ft. 10½ in.) and shotput (50 ft. 10¼ in.) and San Diego’s Karen Oldham in the javelin (163 ft. 5½ in.) demonstrated fair U.S. strength in the field events. Said Temple: “We’ve got a chance. We’ll have to wait and see.”