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Sports Legends - Jesse
Owens
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Jesse
Owens was born in a poor sharecroppers family in
Danville, Ala., on Sept. 12, 1913. The
seventh child of Henry and Emma Alexander Owens, he was named James Cleveland
Owens. "J.C.", as he was called, was nine when the family moved to
Cleveland, Ohio, where his new schoolteacher gave him the name that was to
become known around the world. The teacher was told "J.C." when she
asked his name to enter in her roll book, but she thought he said
"Jesse". And Jesse Owens was the name he used for the rest of his
life.
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He
set his first track record by running the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds as a pupil
at Cleveland's Fairview Junior High School in 1932. As a high school student he
won three National Interscholastic Championships in 1933, in Chicago. Due to his sensational
high school track career, Jesse was being sought by dozens of colleges by the
time he reached his senior year. Owens
chose the Ohio State University over all of the colleges pursuing him, even
though the university had no track scholarships to offer at the time. He
supported himself and his young wife, Ruth, with a variety of jobs - as a night
elevator operator and a waiter, by pumping gas and working in the library
stacks, and through a stint as a page in the Ohio Statehouse, all of this in
between practice and record setting on the field in intercollegiate competitions.
His track career at Ohio
State University was remarkable. On one day, May 25, 1935, during a Big Ten meet
at the University of Michigan, Owens equaled the world record for the 100-yard
dash (9.4 seconds) and set new world records for the 220-yard dash (20.3
seconds), the 220-yard low hurdles (22.6 seconds), and the running broad jump
(26 feet 8 1/4 inches, or 8.13 meters).
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Jesse Owens |
Due
to his Athletic prowess and his achievements, Jesse Owens found himself on the
American Team for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. At that time, Hitler was the
dictator of Nazi Germany and it
was his intent to use the games to demonstrate what he believed to be the
superiority of the Aryan, or white, race. However one man comprehensively
demolished this myth by winning four Olympic Gold medals. In
1936 Jesse Owens stood on the center tier of the awards platform of the Berlin
Games to accept his fourth Olympic gold medal. Names and faces of great athletes
flash on and then off the sports panorama, but though others have broken Jesse
Owens' records and accumulated gold medals, he is the best remembered of all the
Olympic athletes. Why? Because he, son of a sharecropper and grandson of a
slave, achieved what no Olympian before him had accomplished; he not only
discredited a heinous dictator, Adolph Hitler, but he affirmed that individual
excellence, rather than race or national origin, distinguishes one man from
another.
Hitler was furious and stormed out of the stadium rather than present the
awards.
Jesse
Owens proved in Berlin and thereafter that he was a dreamer who could make the
dreams of others come true, a speaker who could make the world listen and a man
who held out hope to millions of young people. Throughout his life, he worked
with youths, sharing of himself and the little material wealth that he had. In
this way, Jesse Owens was equally the champion on the playground of the poorest
neighborhoods that he was on the oval of the Olympic games.
Those
days athletes
were not offered lucrative advertising and product endorsement contracts and Jesse Owens had to support his young family with a variety of jobs.
He worked
for a number of years for the Illinois Athletic Commission. He left the
commission in 1955 and made goodwill trips to India and the Far East for the
State Department. Owens died in Phoenix, Ariz., on March 31, 1980.
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