by Jim Tuohy
On the last night of the Republican National Convention thirteen American Olympic athletes who had won gold and silver medals through the years took to the stage to show support for Mitt Romney. In a classic example of Republican exclusionism, not one of those Olympic stars was black.
I would have thought that in America today it would be almost impossible to fill a stage full of hot shot jocks without any of them being black. But the Republicans managed, mostly by concentrating on men and women who excelled at winter sports and swimming, areas were blacks have yet to dominate.
The night before, the RNC did present Condoleezza Rice, who shoots golf in the 90s and was recently admitted to the previously men-only, heavily Republican August National Golf Club, site of the Masters Tournament. While it took 80 years to admit a woman, the Georgia-based club did not drag its feet on admitting blacks. That took only 67 years.
One person the Republicans never considered presenting at the convention was the black athlete who in my opinion stood out above all other competitors in the 2012 Olympics: Manteo Mitchell.
It’s understandable you might not know who Manteo Mitchell is because his performance in the 1600 meter relay—four runners running 400 meters each, once around the track—was the most under-reported story of the Olympics, at least as far as NBC’s television coverage was concerned, and television was where most people got their Olympic news. Mitchell ran on the United States team and what he did was keep running after he broke his left leg halfway through his 400 meter segment.
The United States was a heavy favorite to win the gold medal in the 1600 meter relay, an event they had dominated for years, having last lost in 1972.
Mitchell was assigned to run the first leg of the relay in the preliminary race that would determine whether the USA qualified for the final, something they were expected to do easily. But Mitchell, leading the seven other runners at 200 yards, began to labor, his stride slightly off. Four runners went by him before he managed to pass the baton to the next runner. Mitchell was enough in the race to allow his teammates to make up ground and finish second, which was good enough to put the Americans team in the final the next day.
No one from NBC seemed curious to find Mitchell even after a doctor determined that his leg had been broken at the 200-yard mark. The 400 meters is a punishing race requiring the speed of a dash and the endurance of a distance run, and Manteo Mitchell had run half of one on a broken left tibia. Television learned of it through reporting by USATrack and Field Magazine who talked to the doctor Mitchell went to and, of course to Mitchell himself.
“I felt it break,” Mitchell was quoted. “I heard it. I even put out a little war cry but the crowd was so loud you couldn’t hear it. I wanted to just lie down. It felt like somebody literally just snapped my leg in half.”
If Mitchell had lain down, as he had every right to do, the U.S. team would have been eliminated, so he kept going, and under the circumstances, going fast.
“I knew if I finished strong we could still [qualify for the finals]. I didn’t want to let those three guys down so I just ran on it. It hurt so bad.”
That’s dramatic stuff. If I were a TV producer I’d want to find that guy and get him to tell his story to the nation. People in combat often get valor medals for unselfish acts like that. But TV did not find Mitchell and talk to him. They reported the story from print sources—admittedly with admiration– then moved on to the stories they already had prepared.
The bad leg star of the Olympics was supposed to be Oscar Pistorius from South Africa who was born without tibias and had his legs cut off below the knee when he was 11 months old. In spite of that he participated in all kinds of athletics and became a world class runner, using J-shaped carbon fiber prosthetics. His nickname was the blade runner. He was running the anchor leg on South Africa’s 1600 meter relay team in the final.
Pistorius was a good, if extensively reported, story and NBC was prepared for it. They had a couple of features and interviews with Pistorius leading up to the final, and one after his team finished last. In the meantime, NBC anchors were talking to pretty women volleyballers, cute girl gymnasts, and handsome gold medal swimmers. No talking to Mitchell, especially after the men’s 1600 relay team, without Mitchell, finished second to the Bahaman team.
NBC treated the loss of a gold metal to the Bahamas as a disappointment for team USA when it should have been celebrated as a great silver medal accomplishment made possible because of the astounding grit of Manteo Mitchell. He should have been showcased across the network –several networks, in fact.
The inability of television to recognize what had become the best story of the games while they plugged away at lesser ones, reminded me of Wally Ballou, a fictitious reporter invented by the old radio and television comedy team of Bob and Ray. Wally Ballou consistently missed the larger story for the smaller one. His only journalistic accomplishment was winning 16 Diction Awards.
Wally Ballou in a typical skit is interviewing a grower of cranberries or some such in boring detail as in the radio background are heard gunshots and sirens and people panicking. Wally shows no interest in the rising commotion around him, completing his dull agricultural feature while listeners were left wondering what in the world they were missing.
I ran into some Wally Ballou types in print reporting, too. One of the duties of reporters in the Chicago office of United Press International was to take minor league baseball scores from stringers in nine central states. I think the stringers might have been paid a couple of bucks for scores, and there were no game stories to report, just the scores, which would then be put on the regional wire. But for stringers, it was a start in the news business.
One day a stringer called in and said he had doubleheader scores for, maybe, Fox Cities and Waterloo. He apologized for calling in late, but he said the second game had been delayed. I had no idea when he would usually call in, because of all the chores one had to do on a shift at UPI taking minor league baseball scores was probably the least important or taxing. One would write: “Midwest League: Fox Cities 3 Waterloo 2, (2nd game) Waterloo 8 Fox Cities 4.”
You just thanked the guy and hung up. But for some reason on this night I asked why the second game was delayed. I still don’t know why I asked, maybe because it’s what reporters do—ask questions.
“Oh,” the stringer answered. “The stands collapsed.”
“The stands collapsed? Were there people in the stands?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. They were full.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Oh, yeah. Fifty people were taken to the hospital. They had ambulances from five towns.”
So a routine item turned into a good Midwest story, even though the stringer, Wally Ballou style, didn’t bother to work beyond his assigned task. At the time, I felt the stringer lacked the natural talent that would propel him into the top ranks of journalism. But maybe I was wrong.
He might have become a big success in television news, or as an NBC sportscaster.
North Avenue Magazine 