George Wright: I can tell you how I was singled out to be interviewed. I can tell you about interview itself and I can tell you about the period between the interview and actually seeing the episode and I can tell you about the episode itself.
The Skyline View: Alright.
GW: I thought it was really intelligent actually. This was about five reasons not to blame Tommie Smith and John Carlos for the black power salute in Mexico City.
TSV: Who was John Carlos?
GW: [He was a] U.S. sprinter, also a San Jose state student. He got third in the 200 meter dash at Mexico City. The context of the display was the black power movement of the 1960s, and there is a whole detailed story there but we don’t have to get into right now. Tommie Smith and John were both sprinters. Tommie won the 200 and is considered one of the greatest long sprinters ever. So the guy, as an athlete, was a god and the political gesture was quite dramatic in the context of their talent. It is like Mohammed Ali refusing to go into the service. I mean, he is the heavy weight champion and he said no, this is against my values, so there is a kind of a similarity in their gesture. They were attacked viciously in a lot of quarters. The U.S. media attacked them within next few days with editorial cartoons and editorials.
TSV: : Just because of the gesture?
GW: Supposedly there were two things: one, politics should not be part of the Olympics. You’ve got national teams, you’ve got ceremonies using national anthems and flags, and to say nationalism is not a role is ridiculous but that is the attack that was used. Also more concretely, the International Olympic Committee kicked them off the national team and kicked them out of the [Olympic] village, and forced them to go home.
TSV: : Do you mean on the spot?
GW: Within 24 hours with no due process at all. There was a lot of anger even within the United States Olympic Committee, not necessarily because they believed in the action, because they didn’t, but they did believe in due process, so there was a lot of tension there. And so, the gesture itself has come down as one of the great, great iconic images of the twentieth century, up there with raising the Flag at Iwo Jima. On the other side of the coin, those guys have been considered piranhas to America, they were unpatriotic, they shouldn’t have done it, and racism was not an issue blah, blah, blah. But maybe more concretely those guys have not received the kind of economic opportunities that there talent should have allowed because of the gesture.
TSV: : So it made them unmarketable in the United States?
GW: Exactly, so that is the story. What this documentary did was try to reevaluate what they did and make an argument that they were right to do it and they were correct in doing it and that, in fact, was the conclusion the documentary made. Which is quite interesting in and of itself.
TSV: : What is your role in this?
GW: My association with this is that I wrote this book entitled “Stan Wright- Track coach: my forty years in the good old boy network”, it was published in 2005 and I ghost wrote the autobiography of Stan Wright who was the sprint coach for the 1968 U.S. Olympic team.
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He had known these guys for several years very closely. In fact in 1966 he was the national coach and he oversaw them winning a world record. My book is 20 chapters; six of them are dealing with the Mexico City Olympics episode. So I am known as an expert in this episode with a particular vantage point.
So in October, I was contacted by one of the people I know on the grapevine, and he told me to contact producer Barry Abrams, and I did and he invited me to be interviews.
I went over to a hotel room in Burlingame on a Friday afternoon and I was among several people they interviewed that day and I think I talked to them for 30 minutes and they asked me a whole range of questions, thanked me very much, gave me a baseball cap, and was told it would be on television sometime around Valentine’s Day.
