Today in History: September 12

As the timeline feature on my iGoogle homepage informs me, Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens was born on this day in 1913. The son of a sharecropper and the grandson of a slave, Owens is of course best remembered as the athlete whose four-gold-medal achievement in track and field at the 1936 Olympics put paid to Hitler’s theories of racial superiority, for which the Games in Berlin were supposed to provide a kind of exhibition laboratory.

At those Games, Owens was befriended by one of his German rivals, the long-jumper Luz Long. When Owens beat him in that event, Long was the first to congratulate him, in front of Hitler. As Owens later reminisced,

It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler. You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment. Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace. The sad part of the story is I never saw Long again. He was killed in World War II. (h/t)

Long died in action in Italy in 1943. Though they never met again face to face, between the Berlin Games and his death, the atheist Long and the Christian Owens maintained  a warm epistolary friendship. The last letter Long wrote, several days before his death, was to Owens.

My heart tells me, if I be honest with you, that this is the last letter I shall ever write. If it is so, I ask you something. It is for you go to Germany when this war is done, someday find my son Karl, and tell him about his father. Tell him, Jesse, what times were like when we were not separated by war. I am saying – tell him how things can be between men on this earth. (h/t)

“And Jesse,” Long concluded, in his last known, written words, “I believe in God.”

Years later, Owens would stand beside that son, in his father’s place,  as best man at Karl Long’s wedding.

Simcha’s history post reminds us of the dichotomy, sometimes, between man and myth. As she rightly points out, we need heroes because their example teaches us virtue.  It seems to me that in the case of Jesse Owens, there is a heroism at work behind the larger myth (though it’s no less true)  of broken barriers and triumph in the face of evil:  the heroism of  kindness between two men who might have been enemies and weren’t. Especially there is the kindness of the man who went home to adversity which did not change despite the medals and the triumph, and still had time for the friend he had made in that other hostile place. His friendship was such a witness that in the hour of death, almost, the other man not only thought of it, but clung to it, as a safe place in the storm.

There’s greatness for you. And on a weekend when our memories are tragic, it’s good to be reminded that the human spirit is fraught with beauty, and that history bears witness to this, too.

(a tip of the hat also to Belmont Abbey College president Bill Thierfelder, who told this story at the Eucharistic Congress yesterday, in the course of a talk on sport and virtue.)