Relax and Win from Legacy of Speed

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello Revisionist history listeners. I'm so excited to bring you Season seven in just two short weeks. Until then, I wanted to share another podcast with you that I've been working on. It's a new show called Legacy of Speed. As any loyal revisionist history listener knows, I'm totally crazy about running. So when Tracksmith approached Pushkin to make a show about running in sports activism, I was all in. Legacy of Speed is a series about the transformation of a track program at San Jose State in the nineteen sixties. What started out as just a second tier state college that no one outside of northern California had even heard of, quickly became known as the home to Speed City. Under the guidance of one coach and his unconventional techniques, San Jose launched the careers of the fastest sprinters of the day. I traced the journey of those sprinters who went on to make an iconic protest at the nineteen sixty eight Summer Olympics. The show features conversations with Olympic athletes, sports journalists, performance coaches, and documentarians. You'll hear from some of the best runners of all time. Tommy Smith, John Carlos, Lee Evans. It's a story about athletes who dare to take a stand and the mentors who made them fast and brave enough to pave the way for the sports activism we see today. Here's a preview. You can follow the story by searching for Legacy of Speed wherever you get your podcasts. Nineteen sixty eight, the Summer Olympic Games are in Mexico City for the first time. The Games are truly a television spectacle, twice as many hours of coverage with new technology like instant replay, and it's being broadcast live around the world in color. Everyone is watching.

00:02:09
Speaker 3: The United States leads the Olympics and Metal Awards, and is just about supreme in the sprint races thanks to men like Tommy Smith and John Carlos.

00:02:18
Speaker 2: Tommy Smith John Carlos, two of the greatest sprinters of all time, captured in one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, two black men standing on a platform, each with a fist in the air.

00:02:33
Speaker 3: Yesterday they stood on the victory platform with bowed heads, wearing black socks and gloves and a racial protest.

00:02:49
Speaker 2: I remember seeing that photo as a kid growing up in the nineteen seventies, a kid who was obsessed with sports, And even though I was much too young to understand anything about the context for it, I understood that it was an act of transgression. Over the next five episodes, I want to tell you the story behind that transgression, how those two men ended up on the victory stand, their struggles and triumphs, because in that moment half a century ago, the way we think about sports and social protest shifted forever in ways that we are still wrestling with today. Two extraordinary figures made that iconic moment possible. One Bud Winter, an eccentric tactician who reinvented what it meant to be a coach. The other Harry Edwards, a fiery professor and black power activist who dared to challenge that most sacred of American institutions. And here's the remarkable thing. All four of those men, those two runners, the professor and the coach, came from the same place, a second tier state college that no one outside of northern California had ever heard of, San Jose State, or as it was known back then, Speeds City. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is Legacy of Speed, a story about athletes who dared to take a stand and the visionaries who made them fast enough and brave enough to change the world. In the nineteen sixties, Silicon Valley was not yet called Silicon Valley. That nickname wouldn't come until the early nineteen seventies. But among the Rolling Hills and Citrus Grove south of San Francisco, one hundred revolutions had already started to bubble, the microchip, the beginnings, the personal computer, the Internet. The Bay Area was wide open to innovation and reinvention and anyone who had a crazy idea about how to do things better. And in the middle of that ferment was a commuter school in downtown San Jose. San Jose State State was where a coach named Bud Winter held court, and Bud Winter is where this story begins. Bud was one of the most important coaches of the twentieth century. He invented modern sprinting with an unconventional approach that has today become dogma. Have you ever watched the way of the fastest man in history, the Jamaican sprinter Ussain Bolt, glides down the track, You, Saint.

00:05:34
Speaker 1: Bolt, look at the timeline by night, world record, unruffled, calm composed.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: You can credit Bud Winter for the way Bolt ran. Bolt's coach was a Bud Winter disciple. Over his career, Bud coached one hundred and two All Americans, thirty seven world record holders, and twenty Olympians, including Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the two sprinters who raised their gloved fists in Mexico City. Bud's athletes so completely dominated sprinting the people stopped calling the San Jose A team by its formal nickname, the Spartans, and just called it Speeds City.

00:06:16
Speaker 4: He was a scrapper. He grew up in a poor neighborhood in San Francisco. Yeah, it was right by the zoo.

00:06:22
Speaker 2: That's Kathy Winter, Bud's daughter. Bud Winter was born Lloyd C. Winter in nineteen oh nine and grew up in San Francisco.

00:06:31
Speaker 4: Well, his mom was a spitfire Irish woman, and his father was a photographer and a very quiet introvert. And he lived on the poor side, So I think that's why he had such a compassion and a heart for people that didn't have money.

00:06:48
Speaker 2: Bud ended up at UC Berkeley. He studied psychology. After college, Bud coached football at a high school and then a junior college. He was a man of obsessions. He didn't just golf. He invented a golf club that he swore hit the ball further because he'd exposed it to radiation. He didn't just fish, He went fishing around the world. He was unkempt, unassuming. He wore mismatched patterns. His clothes were often wrinkled. When he traveled, he stuffed his suits into a Duffel bag.

00:07:20
Speaker 4: You always seem to have soup or something down his shirt, but when you pointed it out, he'd go, you know who cares. It just wasn't his priority.

00:07:30
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty one, Bud took a job coaching track and freshman football at San Jose State.

00:07:36
Speaker 4: I would say my dad was somewhat absent, and I don't say that with negativity in my heart or anything, but his whole life was about track and field and the guys. We'd be sitting there at the table at dinner, and all of a sudden, my dad would get up and he would go over to the side and he'd start to practice like the shot put. Okay, now he wants to tell him to turn his head this way. And here we were in the middle of trying to tell him a story about what we did at school.

00:08:03
Speaker 2: As a coach. Bud was a teacher, not a screamer.

00:08:07
Speaker 5: The thing that impressed me about Bud he never raised his voice.

00:08:11
Speaker 2: This is Ray Norton, one of Bud's athletes.

00:08:14
Speaker 5: And never did I ever hear him use propenity. That's pretty unusual for a coach, My high school coach. Is all they did yo. They couldn't coach all that they was used propetit.

00:08:25
Speaker 2: Bud didn't look like a traditional coach. He didn't sound like a traditional coach, and that was all part of the charm. Norton remembers the first time he met Bud, he was still in high school. He and some of his friends who also ran went to a track meet at the University of California, Berkeley, the annual showdown between the Big Ten and the conference that would become the Pac twelve.

00:08:48
Speaker 5: First of all, we snuck in the place and we're sitting quietly hoping nobody noticed us.

00:08:53
Speaker 2: You know, Norton and his friends all ran track for their high school teams. A couple of them were pretty fast, but none of them expected to be recruited by the colleges at this meet. It's nineteen fifty five, not too many of the big track schools. We're interested in black sprinters.

00:09:12
Speaker 5: We watched the big boys, the collegian guys, and then when they left, we kind of eased down on the track and got into starting blocks.

00:09:22
Speaker 2: They started to raise each other just for fun.

00:09:27
Speaker 5: We were supposed to be there, obviously, and there were several coaches in the stands watching. All of them left except one that one was but Winter and but walked from the bleachers and then we were in the starting blocks and we said, oh god, we've been busted. They're going to throw us out of here. And he walked real slow, and then he stopped in front of me and he said, do you know you could be the world's fastest human? And I went k, I wasn't even the fastest guy in the starting blocks where he was standing. A couple of the high school kids could beat me. And they're going, what this coach must be old something.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: At the time, Norton had no idea what Bud saw on him. It wasn't until he went to San Jose State that he understood that Bud had turned the science of sprinting on its head.

00:10:27
Speaker 5: I was six three sprinters are like five eight, five, nine, five ten. What he saw is that I had a natural relaxation mode. I did string what I ran and the other kids did. He could teach me the relaxation mode, and I could handle it.

00:10:43
Speaker 2: The relaxation mode shorthand for the complex set of ideas at the heart of Bud's philosophy. Coaches for generations had stressed the visible application of effort intensity, the grimacing, tightly coiled runner, huffing and snorting down the track like a runaway plow horse work harder, push, push, push, But Bud's thought was, what if that was entirely backward? What if the sprinter should be gliding. Norton joined Bud's team in nineteen fifty six on a scholarship. He would become a star, the first real star of the so called speed city era at San Jose State. We'll be right back. Bud Winter had his light bulb moment when he first arrived at San Jose State. He sat in on a class taught by Dorothy Hazeltine Yates. It was about the psychology of fighter pilots, an enormously important subject. At the start of World War Two. Pilots were suffering from nervous exhaustion, burnout breakdowns. They were making fatal errors in combat because of the enormous stress they were under. In the class, Bud learned about a new approach to tackling the problem, teaching the pilot's relaxation techniques. Bud watched as the techniques were applied to boxers at San Jose State. This is what Bud wrote in his nineteen eighty one book, Relax and Win. The results proved not only gratifying in some cases, they were amazing to us. Green inexperienced novices very soon showed the cool, confident poise of champions. San Jose boxers won every bout that season, some spectacularly. At the start of the Second World War, Bud enlisted in the Navy, and he got a chance to build on what he'd learned with Yates's class at San Jose. He was put in charge of a research study at a flight school in California looking at relaxation training for cadets. It was the beginning of what would be a radical transformation in the way we think about preparing people for stressful jobs. We called up doctor Belisa Vranich to get a little one oh one on relaxation techniques.

00:13:14
Speaker 6: So, any tense muscle you have on your body is using oxygen, and you need other muscles to be sort of prepped and alert and ready to go.

00:13:26
Speaker 2: Brandich is a clinical psychologist who works with lots of people in high stressed jobs, law enforcement, firefighters, navy seals, pilots.

00:13:35
Speaker 6: So if your entire body is tense, you are going to be using up calories and you're going to be using up oxygen. For instance, chess masters burn a tremendous amount of calories playing chess, and it's because your brain uses so much oxygen. So if you are thinking intense and if your body is tense, you're tapping into your tank of energy.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: Imagine how quickly you might drain that tank of energy in a dog fight, And if you return safely, how would you manage to get some sleep so you could fight again tomorrow. The solution is to learn how to relax, to contain and control your stress.

00:14:14
Speaker 6: Inhale two three four.

00:14:17
Speaker 2: Breathing slowly and deliberately. This is called tactical breathing.

00:14:22
Speaker 6: Inhale, stretch a little bit more, sigh on the exhale, and you're ready to go. So your breathing controls your heart rate, and your heart rate is your main indicator of stress. So when you get stressed out, your heart rate goes up, and once it goes past a certain point, it affects your motor skills, your fine motor skills, your memory, and your ability to perform. So, whether you are working in a corporate setting or you're an athlete, you'd like your heart rate to be at a place where you are calm but alert.

00:15:03
Speaker 2: At the Flight School, Winter study involved two hundred cadets. For six weeks, they get tended classes, played sports, and took psychological tests. The cadets were split into two groups. One was the control group. The other group learned relaxation techniques. Bud wrote about the outcome in his book. The relaxation group made more significant and even spectacular progress. The greatest improvement by the relaxation group was demonstrated in the courses that involved the most pressure. When the war was over, Bud went back to San Jose staid, and that's when he realized if relaxation techniques could help pilots. Surely they could also help sprinters. Doctor Belisa Vranich again.

00:15:52
Speaker 6: If you are able to get yourself to breathe well mechanically meaning dive framatically, and now you train those muscles separate from your sport, it actually affects your times. It delays fatigue.

00:16:09
Speaker 2: The problem at the heart of a sprinter's task was pressure. They weren't running a marathon where they had two hours to settle in and adjust and make up for mistakes and misjudgments. One hundred meters sprint is ten seconds, the two hundred meters is twenty seconds. The runner must react instantly to the gun, run a flawless race, extract every ounce of speed from their bodies over an impossibly compressed timeframe. The sprinter settling into the blocks before a race was under an extraordinary, potentially debilitating amount of pressure, and the body's untrained response to that pressure makes the runner slower, not faster. Bud realized he needed to fix that problem. That idea seems common sense to our ears today, but he came from Bud.

00:16:58
Speaker 6: He was really visionary and understanding how important relaxation was to performance. Think about it in the forties fifties, or sixties. What you were hearing was buck right, and maybe a little bit later was no pain, no gain, was pull yourself up by your bootstraps. So that he was saying, relaxed to perform better was fantastic because it works.

00:17:24
Speaker 2: Ray Norton and other athletes on the track team remember Bud and his phrases.

00:17:28
Speaker 5: How do you explain to a sprinter running bull speed to relax? Well, you teach them to relax by using certain terminologies, mantras.

00:17:44
Speaker 2: Really, they were designed to keep parts of your body relaxed. If you ran for Bud, a couple of them were burned into your brain.

00:17:55
Speaker 7: Loose hands.

00:17:56
Speaker 5: You never clinch your fists when you're running. Loose jaws, but you don't have to open your mouth, but just relax.

00:18:03
Speaker 2: To demonstrate the power of loose hands loose jaws, Bud would have his athletes run it tight, straining with effort and time them. Then he'd have them run relaxed, their hands unclenched, their faces sagging with what Bud called fish lips. The stopwatch didn't lie. I spoke with Tommy Smith, one of the greatest of all Bud's athletes. Was it difficult to master some of the things he was talking about.

00:18:50
Speaker 8: So it was a lot of things that he put into a process that we had to understand, and it was very difficult at times for us to master the usage of the muscles to their maximum without tensing up, without overdoing it. The process of too much is not good, too little is just as bad.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: And just like the Navy cadets, Bud's athletes also had to do visualization exercises. This is Ben Tucker, a distance runner.

00:19:23
Speaker 7: Before each competition, Bud would always call us in on the Friday night. This is the night before the event, and then he would have us sit in a room, turn the lights out, and then we would just sit there and he would just talk us through. This is the first lap. This is a second lap. And so he had us not only strategizing, but he had us seeing ourselves. This is the night before. A hypnosis, but it's hypnotize on us, but it got into our heads, got into our heads.

00:20:21
Speaker 2: But also ran his athletes methodically through drills he'd created, like the high knee exercise. The runner marches up and down the track, driving one knee after the other high into the air. In an exaggerated slow motion version of running.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: That's a real basic of how sprinter's run.

00:20:39
Speaker 2: Doctor Peter wayAnd And studies the biomechanics of sprinting at the Locomotive Performance Laboratory at Southern Methodist University, and it's.

00:20:47
Speaker 1: Directly connected to how forcefully the sprinters hit the ground. So if you watch a marathon or run, they don't run that way. They have kind of a shuffling gait. The sprinters punch the track with their limb, so the high knee lift allows in the space to get the high velocity and then the quick stop. It's like delivering a punch to the ground.

00:21:04
Speaker 2: The more force the sprinter can deliver with that leg punch, the faster they can get off the ground, which leads to a longer, more efficient stride.

00:21:13
Speaker 1: All of the difference in how fast they can run, all of the force difference happens during that initial impact period. So it's essential that they get the highknee lift and that they execute the high velocity and quick stop. That's the entire secret right there.

00:21:27
Speaker 2: The innovations, the tinkering, the rethinking, the search for the slightest edge never stopped.

00:21:35
Speaker 9: I realized, I said, this is the first genius. I remember because his mind was busy of how to make us run faster.

00:21:43
Speaker 2: That's Lee Evans, another Abud's greatest sprinters.

00:21:47
Speaker 9: I remember he said, okay, everybody, give me your your shorts, and he was punch holes in the back part of him so the wind could throw through them better. And he said, okay, okay, give me, everybody, give me the spikes out of your shoes. We take our spikes on get to him, and he would shape them like a pyramid so that the real part would get more push off. He was always thinking of waye to take off a tenth or one hundredths of a second, and I never had a coach to you'd be concerned about little minor details like that.

00:22:34
Speaker 2: At the heart of the Bud Winter Revolution is that he saw his role as cultivating the talent of his athletes. He took raw clay and molded it. That is not how coaches saw their role in those years. The traditional coach exploited talent. The distinction between cultivation and exploitation is crucial. Coaches of that era were motivators, recruiters, tacticians. Coaches took what they were given and put it to use. Bud was one of the first modern coaches who understood that a coach's job was to make you facture elite performance systematically and methodically, not just shepherd it into existence. The most successful of the coaches of the contemporary age, Bill Belichick and football, Phil Jackson and Pat Summit and basketball are in many ways Bud's disciples. When a coach wins again and again in different places and with different athletes, it means they have crossed the line from exploitation to cultivation. Bud was the profit of that movement. Bud held coaching clinics NonStop. He wrote a how to manual, So You Want to Be a Sprinter that became a must read for coaches and athletes alike. In it, two cartoon sprinters helped demonstrate the right way and the wrong way to execute Bud's techniques. Their names were Jack Champ and Joe Chump. Their coach is a Bud like figure named Igor Beaver. Get it egor Beaver. He eventually made a fifteen minute instructional film that he shot at San Jose State.

00:24:12
Speaker 10: Coach Winter believes that the sprinter should undergo a special drill.

00:24:16
Speaker 2: Members of Bud's team appeared in the film, which was called sprinting with Bud Winter.

00:24:20
Speaker 10: Bohm action is powerful, but it is also relaxed. The run of things, of driving his elbows, the hands are loose.

00:24:28
Speaker 2: Ray Norton was his first major recruit. In nineteen fifty eight, Norton tied the world record for the one hundred yard dash with a time of nine point three seconds. The only other Americans that held that record were from big schools like USC and COL. That same year, Budd added another star to his team. This one was shorter in stock here, a more traditional looking sprinter. Bob Pointer was a high school state champion from Pasadena who had his heart set on USC. He went to junior college trying to study his way onto the USC track team. Meanwhile, Bud kept sending him letters.

00:25:06
Speaker 11: That kind of thrilled me, you know, in fact that somebody for you tented to you.

00:25:10
Speaker 2: Eithers started to pay attention to San Jose State too.

00:25:13
Speaker 11: It drew crowds from you know, the Bay area and all around because Bud would promote the heck out of attract meet and we got an invitation to go to the pen relays. Well, I didn't even know where that was because I'd never been back east in my life.

00:25:29
Speaker 2: The Penn Relays in Philadelphia are the oldest track and field event in the United States, a massive international carnival of track and field.

00:25:37
Speaker 11: So Ray and I went and we won all the stuff back east, and people back there they hadn't heard the sounds. They used to pronounce its San Josie and say, those guys from San Jose, And they thought it was a black college because we had gold uniforms and most of the kids were African Americans. But what that did? That put Soundly State on the map.

00:26:01
Speaker 2: Bud was doing all of this with a minuscule budget out of state college that when he arrived didn't even have dormitories.

00:26:08
Speaker 11: He loved beating Carol of Stafford and anybody who's big, because he felt that like the poor people going out against the rich people.

00:26:20
Speaker 2: And Ray Norton, he was beating almost everyone.

00:26:24
Speaker 5: Fifty nine was my biggest year. At that time. I held the world's record for the one hundred yards, two hundred and twenty yards around a curve, the hundred meters, and the two hundred meters. I had all those records at one time, and I also went undefeated another meters period for two years. I beat them all, everybody.

00:26:48
Speaker 2: It was now nineteen sixty. Norton had been going strong for almost two years. Everyone thought he would win big at the Rome Olympics that year, but then just before the games, he suffered a freak injury. A teammate, the high jumper John Thomas, played a prank and threw a snake at him.

00:27:07
Speaker 5: That was a real stink. It was a little one, but it was, you know, done. No, I don't do things still though. I jumped out of that hurdle's position and snapped my back low part of my back. It roughs at the nerve. This is three weeks before the Olympic Games. I had no feeling in my legs, couldn't walk. I didn't run in any tune up meets. I couldn't I didn't run anymore until the Olympic Games, which I had probably lost ninety percent of my conditioning. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. I lost ten pounds.

00:27:43
Speaker 2: But Norton didn't want to give up his chance at the Olympics.

00:27:46
Speaker 5: I just decided that I still could win and nobody can beat me, even though I couldn't walk. Three weeks before.

00:27:52
Speaker 2: That, Norton made it to the finals of the one hundred meters and the two hundred meters at the Olympics, but he finished dead last. Then he botched a baton pass in a four by one hundred meter relay, leading to a disqualification. The meltdown was astonishing. The US hadn't like the men's hundred meters since nineteen twenty eight.

00:28:13
Speaker 5: I don't even know how I ran. To be honest with.

00:28:14
Speaker 2: You, only a few people knew about his injury. One of them was Bud. Norton says he begged his coach not to reveal the truth.

00:28:27
Speaker 5: I'm in one room, Bud next door. My door's open, so Buck to see me because I'm hurt, and he knows it. Okay, So I say, Bud, I said, you know, I'm drafted. I'm gonna play football after the Olympics. He says, I know. Champ he called me Jim and I said, I don't want him to know I'm hurt.

00:28:45
Speaker 2: Norton says Bud didn't want to lie.

00:28:48
Speaker 5: I said, you're not. It's my nerves in my back that's killing me. All you got to see is my nerves. You're not gonna be telling a lie. Let's say I said can you do that? But I don't want these people to think they get damaged goods because I'm playing football as soon as I get back out of the Olympics.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: All Bud would say after Norton's loss was that ra Orton was trying too hard and that's the worst thing a runner can do, which was the truth as far as Bud Winter was concerned. Speed City had been stopped short in its first great international test.

00:29:22
Speaker 12: The Olympic Games to me were at once a inspiring, exciting, interesting, horrible experience.

00:29:33
Speaker 2: That's Bud in nineteen sixty three giving the opening remarks that a sports symposium hosted by San Jose Steai.

00:29:40
Speaker 13: They were aspiring because once again they pointed out what we must do in the United States if we're going to maintain our sports supremacy. They were wonderful because it pointed out that maybe on the field of sport is the one common ground upon which the nations in the world can get together. And now horrible because of what happened to Ray and Norton and are losing the sprint supremacy.

00:29:59
Speaker 2: All of that relaxation training, the visualization exercises, the loose hands, loose jaws, high knees all undone a freak injury from a prank gone wrong. Bud was devastated, but he and his runners would get another chance in the spotlight.

00:30:20
Speaker 13: Every Olympic Games has its heroes, both athletes and coaches, and perhaps.

00:30:25
Speaker 2: Only this time, Speed City would get swept up in another bigger revolution across America. The nineteen sixties would bring riots, protests, violence, political assassinations, and the organized marches of the Civil rights movement. And here was a group of young black men who had already been liberated from one orthodoxy, who had been taught that calm and self possession and preparation could unleash extraordinary performance. The sprinters of speed City would become famous, and a question would be asked of them that had never really been asked of athletes before. What will you make of your position? You will stand on a platform, what will you do once you're there? In our next episode, the athletes of speed City win, acclaim and break world records, but off the track, they struggle to make ends meet. After a discus thrower objects to the treatment of black athletes on campus, he sparks a movement that will become one of the most important moments of activism in sports history. Legacy of Speed is hosted by Me Malcolm Gladwell. It's executive produced by Tracksmith and presented by Puma. Our producers are Joel Meyer and Emily Rostak. The show is edited by Chrishibobita and Karen Shakerji, and our mix engineer is Jake Gorski. Original music composed by Alexis Quadrato with trumpet by Lee Hogan's fact checking by Wynton Saint Clair. Our Pushkin EPs are Katherine Girdeau and miel Obel. Our development team is Lee Talmulaude and Justin Lang. We had help with research and archival material from eur La Hill, Kathy Winter, Tom Ratcliffe, John Stalkup, Brett Lyman, and Carly Lowe. Special thanks to Bud Winter Enterprises. Legacy of Speed is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and ad free listening across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts that was a preview of Legacy of Speed. You can follow the story by searching for Legacy of Speed wherever you get your podcasts.