Customer Reviews

Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith (Sporting)

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was a teammate of Tommy"s in 1965 at SJS. I found the book to be factual and very interesting. I learned a lot about a person I thought I knew. I also learned a lot about other things going on at the same time that I was not aware of. Things about race relations during those times, that I though were only going in the South. In my many years in Track and field I, being white, was a minority but never gave it much thought, skin color was never an issue with me, maby because I was white. He gave coach winter a lot of credit and of course he was a great coach however as a person he left a lot to be desired. If you were a sprinter and white (with the exception of Wayne Herman) then you didn't have much of a chance making the first team I was very interested in what Tommy had to say about breaking the 200 record for the first time. He gave Wayne Herman the credit when in fact I led that race for the first 125 yards. Wayne did finist second and I third. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to people who want to know the man. I never got over what happend in Mexico City, but I understand it more. I am an olympic purist and still believe the Olympics is no place for demonstration or politics.

This story was long overdue. It should have been written at least 20 years ago. Better late than never and it was well worth the wait. The event that started this book took place almost 40 years ago and it was one of the most explosive events of 1968 when a lot of explosive and historical events took place.

Tommie Smith is very candid in his language and approach to telling his story. Very humorous at times and at other times the events will have you riveted to your seat. His story clarifies a lot of rumors and hearsay about the actual goings-on about what actually happens in the Olympic Village and the before and aftermath of what happend on the medal stand. It includes a lot of info on his upbringing and family life as a kid and his life as a husband and father. Once I opened the book, I could not put it down until I finished it.

An Olympic Gold Medalist in 1968, Tommie has proven to be an Olympian in life also by overcoming innumerable obstacles.

Congratulations Tommie on a job well done........

mitch

I cannot remember if I watched the medal presentation ceremony for the 200 meter race at the 1968 Olympics. I think I did, if I did not then I missed a historic occasion.
At that time racial problems in USA were not unfamiliar to me and I knew of people like Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis... However I thought that those problems would not affect top class athletes and that they were fairly treated by the white society. So I regarded the medal ceremony as a strong and emotional protest by people who though not directly affected wanted to give a voice to the majority of afro-american citizens.
I could not be wronger. For instance, it never crossed my mind that Carlos and Smith feared to be shot by someone from the crowd.
The book under review is a detailed account of Tommie Smith's life, focussing on the events that led to Mexico 68 and what happened afterwards.
It is hard to believe what the two athletes, Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medallists respectively, had to endure: insults, menacing junk mail (a friend of a Smith's sister later confessed she used to send similar messages just for fun), the collapse of a marriage, a wife's suicide, the lack of support from people who could have helped (the former footballer Jim Brown was one of those), other black athletes strongly complaining their careers had been destroyed (Jim Hines, for example), no jobs...
Also the families suffered. Smith's mother died at 57 and he strongly implies her death was caused by the stress that the situation generated. His brothers and sisters suffered all sorts of abuse and his youngest brother still seems to blame his life failures on him.
It is no wonder that Muhammad Ali threw his Roma gold medal into the Mississipi river when realized that he was treated as before in his home town.
The story appears to have a happy ending, the book closes with the unveiling of a statue
portraying both athletes where everything started - the campus of San Jose State College -,
but has it? Does anything in the world erase the strong suffering both athletes had to face?
On reading this book I was reminded of a TV movie I watched long ago. The character played by Bette Davis, an old teacher, bumps into a former and much, much younger pupil.
They recall her motto - It's better to lose on one's terms than to win on someone else's. (I'm quoting from memory). I think that Tommie Smith might agree.

With several long-winded sections on the kinetics of sprinting and slams against athletes - John Carlos, George Foreman, Bob Seagren, Lee Evans, teammates on the Cincinnati Bengals - and others - Dr. Harry Edwards, Jim Brown, the NAACP - it is no wonder why it took 40 years for Tommie Smith to get his autobiography published.

In what is oftentimes a very tedious read, Smith and co-author David Steele ruin what is a powerful personal account of an athlete who truly wanted to use his talent for a greater good and the institutionalized racism in this country that he has confronted his entire life.

Smith's recollections of the Olympic Project for Human Rights is particularly moving and he does an excellent job is dispelling the myths that has clouded the issue since the late 1960s. For the record, his Olympic gold medal was never seized by the International Olympic Committee.

But his personal vendettas against so many people and institutions detracts mightily from his message. It may have been theraputic for Smith, but whining about the salaries of Bengal teammates and magnifying every perceived slight from friends/colleagues into high drama becomes juvenile and silly.

I was very excited when I heard that Smith's autobiography was finally going to be published. But it proved to be a very disappointing read.

The 1968 Olympics in Mexico City are such a great memory for me...I watched Bob Beamon destroy the world long jump record at 29 feet 2 ½ inches, Jim Ray Hinds set the 100 meter world record and Lee Evans set the 400 meter world record all the while arguing with my father to let me stay up past my bedtime and watch the coverage on ABC (I was 9 years old at the time). I remember watching replays of Tommie Smith and John Carlos battling for the 200 meter gold medal and intuitively understanding the act and not the controversy following the black gloved salute during the playing of the National Anthem. I watched the Howard Cosell interview with Tommie the next day and really could not fathom what the controversy was...wasn't it an understood fact that Smith and Carlos were protesting what was already known in the USA; that black athletes were exploited and that human rights particularly for the black man were hypocritical?

It was with these memories and with genuine joy that I discovered this autobiography by Tommie Smith. Wanting to get more inside information and to learn further about the motivation behind the black gloved "salute", I discovered that the lives of Smith and Carlos became one which epitomized the repression of the black man and learned that both athletes lives both before and after the Olympics were anything but normal. Written in a sort of sixties rebelliousness attitude, Smith chronicles his life and in the process reinvents himself on the world stage. Along the way he seems to learn forgiveness and discovers that life, like athletics, is filled with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

If one is looking for a book that is not necessarily elegant prose but one which tells a story truly worthy of historical scrutiny and which explains a seminal moment in our generation and in the process documents further the abhorrent subjugation of American citizens than "Silent Gesture" is for you. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, although certainly polar opposites and not really linked ideologically, remain tied together because of their act that propelled (at least in my mind) and accelerated the lessening of racism. With this act, both became cultural heroes and helped define an age where racism and stereotypes became a little less severe. As a result, Tommie becomes a true American hero and justifies my "hero worship".

Whether you agree with Smith's and Carlos's act or not, one must agree that it was a truly transforming moment in American history. Therefore one must read Tommie Smith's revelatory account of this momentus period and rethink the motivation behind this percieved rebellious act and give Tommie his due...he propelled race relations forward and in the process added his name to the important figures of the sixties revolution.

I really enjoyed "The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World," but I noticed a few lines in that read about how he and Tommie Smith didn't get along. There was a mention of things that Tommie Smith said about him in Tommie Smith's book that Tommie Smith felt about John Carlos. And Tommie Smith sure did have a lot to say about Tommie Smith. If you're wondering why I keep saying "Tommie Smith," that was the SAME thing I was thinking while reading this book. He just kept talking about himself in the third person.

When he wasn't doing that, he was complaining about John Carlos talking too much and going on and on about how mad he was that Carlos said he let Smith win. If you really think you won a match, nobody can make you change your mind about that. And nowhere in my mind, even after reading Carlos' book, convinced me that he let Smith win so all the ranting about it made him sound incredibly insecure. He also kept repeating how he won a world record and how fast he was. I get it. You won a world record. I respect that. But after repeating it several times and then going into other chapters to remind us of it, I didn't understand what he gained from it. I really wanted to read his side of why they decided to send a message about racial equality that day in the Olympics, but instead I was reading about whose idea it was for the gloves and socks. Even in Carlos' book, I didn't care about that. I just wanted to know more about the conversation and personal feelings, not who was more responsible for what.

"The John Carlos Story" was written in a conversational manner, and when I wasn't glued to his opinions on racial equality, I enjoyed hearing about his upbringing. Even though the topic was serious, John Carlos had a friendlier (and sometimes funnier) way of telling the story. And minus those few lines mentioned above, I didn't get the impression that he had animosity towards Smith. I'm guessing Carlos felt like the event was far more important than personal differences between these two, and guess what? IT WAS. With Smith, there was a lot of talk about picking cotton and more complaining. Again, you only need to say it once...and then move on. I tried. I really tried. But the book sounded so bitter and at page 140, I closed the book about Tommie Smith talking about Tommie Smith for good.

This book, like Fredrick Douglas account of his life in slavery, will long outlive its author. A work of delicate balance between racial bigotry and personal regret, Smith sketches the path life prepared him for in his race with destiny, and his confrontation with an unforgiving world, bent on the path of self-destruction many in Movement politics of the Sixties desperately wanted to abandon.

Tommie Smith provided a critical departure from the insanity of race hatred coupled with nuclear confrontation and terror that most in his generation lived in a state of trama and fear. And it is to Tommie's credit that he decided then, in that place at that time, to take a stand (no pun) for the sake of humanity and peace on the planet. A planet suffering from abuse and pillage for many decades if not centuries.

As a result, and having been a leader in the Movement myself back then, a peer and classmate of Tommie's well I know the pain and agony he must have felt for trying to stop all mankind from a doomed fate and fall beyond a bottomless pit awaiting a tragic end. Like the GI throwing himself on a lose grenade on the battlefront, Tommie risked his entire future to save untold others. It should not be unexpected then, that we find between the pages of his work, pain, anger, and agnest. How could we, who much like Fredrick Douglas revealing story of slavery, know in any other way, what it was like to stand in those shoes on the Victory Stand -- a victory for the Wretched of the Earth, as well as those who gave their lives that he may make a statement with his 'Silent Gesture'

Tim Fitzgerald

I enjoyed learning more about Mr. Smith, but found the writing to be cumbersome, and a bit boring.

The concept was a good one, unfortunately the writing was poor.

I feel that the previous reviewers each has an ax (albeit a different ax) to grind. I am simply a progressive who happens to follow the sport of track & field, and have since before 1968. I admire both Smith and Carlos, but I thought Smith's book (I have not read Carlos')was self-serving and, as one reviewer noted, compromised by regret. To those of us of that generation , to whom that silent gesture was meaningful indeed, whatever its exact motivation, this volume constitutes a terrible disappointment. I'll take the Tommie Smith of 1968 without resrvations, but who's THIS guy?

I thought the book was wordy but interesting. I wish the ghost writer had more control. Sometimes preachy. Slow read.