Trials & Tryouts

Revived by Baron Pierre de Coubertin to promote international amity in 1896, the Olympic Games are separated by four-year periods of bickering, money-grubbing and journalistic squeals of indignation. Current bonfire of ill will, back talk and panhandling began when the Olympic Torch was ceremoniously extinguished at Los Angeles in 1932. Last week it showed signs of ending as the best swimmers, divers, runners and jumpers in the U. S. finally got down to the business of swimming, diving, running and jumping to see which of them would actually represent the U. S. at Berlin next month.

Randalls Island, To make the Olympic tryouts the year's most brilliant track meet and to hold it in a brand new stadium was the commendable plan of Chairman William J. Bingham of the Olympic Track & Field Committee. Last March he asked New York City's Park Commissioner Moses when the new Triborough Bridge -- and Randalls Island Stadium would be ready. Commissioner Moses promised they would be ready in time for the Olympic tryouts. Last week, Commissioner Moses kept his promise by opening the bridge, which was the only way to reach the stadium, one hour before the meet was scheduled to start therein. In other respects, Chairman Bingham & committee failed to realize their plans. In a dusty little stadium surrounded by tin cans and scraps of lumber, not quite half the expected capacity crowd of 22.000 turned up for the first day of the meet. Until a drenching thunderstorm chased them home, they sat in puzzled silence watching a succession of events run off about as systematically as the potato races at a church bazaar.

The contests--to announce which the Committee did not even bother, when the loudspeakers broke down, to furnish an amateur badge-wearer with a second-hand megaphone--were in athletic merit probably equal, if not superior to those which a cosmopolitan crowd of 100.000 will witness in Berlin's Olympic Stadium next month. In twelve of the scheduled events, the U.S. has competitors who have made better times or distances than any European rivals. In the five remaining events, the entrants at the Randalls Island meet were, by & large, as competent as the entrants in the same events will be at Berlin. This does not mean that the U. S. will win all twelve events at Berlin. Handicaps of ocean crossing and new conditions, added to the sheer weight of numbers, will make five or six Olympic championships gratifying. After the second installment of the meet--which, watched by as many people as the little Randalls Island Stadium would hold, went comparatively smoothly --66 competitors were named as U. S. track & field delegates to the Olympic Games. Notable performances:

P:. Ohio State's dusky Jesse Owens, in what would have seemed an incredible feat had not his own record in the past two years made it seem inevitable, won three events: 100 metres, 200 metres, broad jump. No one else qualified in more than two events.

P:. Two Negro high jumpers--Cornelius Johnson, David Albritton--broke the world's record, tied at 6 ft. 9 3/4 in.

P:. The misfortune of Eulace Peacock, who competed with an injured thigh, did not prevent Negroes from making a clean sweep of the sprint tryouts. Ralph Metcalfe was runner-up to Jesse Owens in the 100-metre dash; Mack Robinson placed second in the 200-metre. Pitt's Freshman John Woodruff won the 800-metre run. In the 400-metre final, California's Archie Williams, who last month broke the world's record at that distance, won, with California's Jimmy LuValle third.

P:. Five world record holders--Bill Bonthron, Ben Eastman, Walter Marty, Ed Burke, and George Varoff (who set the new pole-vault record last fortnight)-- failed to qualify.

P:. Sprinter Frank Wykoff, Javeliner Lee Bartlett, on U. S. Olympic teams in 1928 & 1932, qualified again.

P:. Discobolus Gordon Dunn won with a throw of 157 ft. 7 1/2 in. (Same day, at Berlin Fraeulein Gisela Mauermeyer threw an equally heavy discus 158 ft. 6 in.).

Warwick. When Max Schmeling left home to fight Negro Joe Louis, German sports writers were in dire need of a logical German way in which to explain the result that everyone expected. The idea they happily hit upon was that Germans were not really obliged to uphold the supremacy of Nordics against Negroes because Negroes are not really people. When Schmeling knocked out Louis this theory was hastily forgotten, but it will doubtless be revived during the Olympic Games, as applicable not only to black but also to yellow athletes. A good proportion of the track events not won by the Negro mainsprings of the U. S. team are likely to go to spry Nipponese.

Japanese improvement in sports in the last decade proves nothing if not that any race which really thinks it worth the trouble can rival any other in the matter of athletics. Japanese athletes in the 1920 Olympics were comically incompetent. Despite the handicap of their size, it took them only a dozen years to take sixth place in Olympic track & field events and first place in swimming, a sport in which Japanese anatomy might well have seemed an insuperable obstacle. Determined to hold the 1940 Olympic Games at Tokyo, Japan is sending such a strong team" to Berlin that last week's U. S. swimming tryouts for men, held for the obscure reasons of the U. S. Olympic Committee in the obscure town of Warwick, R. I..were in the nature of premature consolation races. Very few of the winners can expect to do more at Berlin than get splashed in the face while their Oriental rivals win the prizes.

All the more eager to win the tryouts, because they are not likely to win much else this summer, Chicago's Arthur Highland (100-metre free style), Miami's Ralph Flanagan (400 and 1,500-metre free style), Providence's John Higgins (200-metre breast stroke) and Chicago's Adolph Kiefer (100-metre back stroke) placed first in their specialties. Twenty others qualified for the team. World records were made by Higgins (2 min. 41.1 sec.) and Kiefer (1 min. 7.5 sec.).

Astoria. This year's most notable addition to the squad of girl swimmers & divers, whose grinning faces and seductive figures are the sports-page equivalents of news-page "girlies," is a 16-year-old diver from the arid Iowa crossroads of Nodaway, named Ruth Jump.

One of the commonest forms of preparation for a career as a champion athlete is a sickly childhood. Diver Jump's debility reached the stage where her doctor had to advise her to take up swimming when she was 11. She began high diving a year or so ago, won the women's national championship in her second try for it last week. Because her specialty is a two-and-a-half forward somersault from the 24-ft. plat- form, which no other girl in the world can do, she was handicapped in the Olympic tryouts three days later because the Olympic diving program rewards perfection of execution rather than quantity of varia- tions. Needing a third place or better to make the team, the best she could do was fourth. Winner was Los Angeles' pert, blonde Dorothy Poynton Hill.

In Astoria's brand new municipal pool, the aquatic tryouts turned out to be even more preposterously mismanaged than the track meet across Hell Gate at Randalls Island. Olympic divers, accustomed to having their entrance into the water greeted by large crowds with respectful applause, indignantly discovered that, in order to reach the springboard for practice, they had to stand behind long queues of merry Long Island City sports who were delighted because the opening of the new 20-c- pool coincided with the heat wave. Once reached, the springboard turned out to be an ordinary plank, instead of the special article called for by A. A. U. regulations. Swimmers were even more horrified to find the pool full of screaming children who, on the hottest day in New York's history, showed no inclination whatever to climb out and let the experts in. When the children were finally shunted to one side, the crowning absurdity was revealed. The pool was only three-feet deep instead of the Olympic standard of five. Long-armed swimmers, usually the ablest, who tried to do the crawl scraped their fingernails on the bottom. Said Olympic Coach Ray Daughters: "Mark my words . . . the tryouts are going to be miserable. . . ."

Miserable or not, the tryouts at least set a record for swimming meets by producing no swimming records of any kind. Qualified for the Olympic team were 18 familiar sports-page figures, including Crooner Eleanor Holm Jarrett (back stroke); Katherine Rawls (freestyle sprint, springboard dive), Lenore Kight Wingard (400-metre free style).

Money. After the Olympic Torch was extinguished at Los Angeles in 1932, the boresome bickerings began with a meeting of the American Olympic Association to decide whether to send a team to Berlin. They extracted a "fair play" pledge from Germany two months before the U. S. was even invited to participate in the games. When a second "fair play" pledge had been demanded and given, they finally agreed to send a team. The next two years were given over to discussions about whether to keep the agreement. Last autumn after General Charles H. Sherrill, U. S. member of the International Olympic Committee, had gone abroad to investigate and returned to say that Germany was keeping its pledge, the Amateur Athletic Union held a stormy meeting. Its president, Jeremiah T. Mahoney promised to resign if the U. S. sent a team to Berlin. The U. S. Olympic Committee voted to send a team, started a campaign for $350,000 to pay for it. That was last December. Since then the Winter Olympic Games have been held, General Sherrill has died, and U. S. representatives in minor Olympic sports, from fencing to canoeing, have been chosen. Last week, ten days before the S. S. Manhattan was supposed to sail with the last members of the U. S. team of 400 and only two weeks before the chain of 282 relay runners start the ceremonial chase from Athens to Berlin, carrying an Olympic Torch, the U. S. Olympic Committee suddenly flabbergasted the sports world by airily announcing that it still needed around $150,000.

Wrote Columnist Westbrook Pegler: "The American Olympic Committee has been raising a faint whine of 'politics and religion' to cover its own incompetence in financing the team. . . . At a time when farms are burning up, herds are dying, the deficit can reasonably be charged to natural causes."

Reasons for the deficit: This year's team lacked an angel like the late Col. Robert M. Thompson, who once underwrote the cost of sending the whole team abroad; anti-Nazi sentiment cut down contributions. Each sport on the Olympic program is supposed to raise funds for its own representatives. Last week emergency appeals cut the deficit down to $75,000. Receipts from the track and aquatic tryouts brought in enough more to allow even eight sad young members of the female U. S. track team, who had been anxiously waiting in Manhattan's Hotel Lincoln, with 75-c- a day for food, to get on the boat. In addition to transportation and upkeep for U. S. athletes, contributions to the Olympic Fund go to pay for coaches, officials, publicists, printing, a substantial corps of clerks. Los Angeles was last week invited to contribute $2,000 to send an Olympic official to Berlin to deliver the Olympic Flag, which has been in its custody since 1932. Los Angeles declined.

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