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August 11, 2008 | 7:42 am

The Jewish Jesse Owens at the Nazi Olympics

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Sam Balter

You probably heard about it yesterday, or got a few text messages when it was televised just before midnight, or read about it this morning, but if you’re still in the dark about the amazing performance by the U.S. men’s swimming 4x100 relay, click here. I’m not a swimmer—little more than a doggie paddler—but I was mesmerized by how those guys blew through the water and “smashed” the favored, and incredibly cocky, French.

The Olympics thus far have been full of good performances (and at least two Jewish winners; Jason Lezak made three). But history is the best measure of one’s accomplishments at the games, and in this case the former Olympian worth talking about is Sam Balter.

An All-American at UCLA in 1929, Balter was 26—of prime basketball age—when the United States sent its best athletes to Berlin for the Nazi Olympics. That year was 1936, and the Olympics were best remembered for the heroics of Jesse Owens, an African America who won four medals in Hitler’s stadium. “On the sacred soil of the Fatherland, the master athlete humiliated the master race,” ESPN later wrote. But Balter too did his part in shaming the man who shamed humanity.

Balter was a Jew, the only Jew on the men’s basketball team. Yes, a Jew who, like Jordan Farmar, had skills on the hardwood and, in 1936, helped the United States win the first gold medal in the history of Olympic basketball.

NPR’s Carrie Kahn, with access to recordings her grandfather made before his death in 1998, reflected on Balter’s legacy last week in a moving personal essay. She revealed that, despite what she grew up believing, her Patoo, as she called him, agonized for months over whether to even play in the Nazi Olympics.

In July of 1936, he boarded the ocean liner Manhattan and left New York harbor for Berlin.

It wasn’t long, Patoo says, before he worried he had made a mistake. Despite the promise that Hitler wouldn’t use the games for his Nazi cause, propaganda brochures were handed out daily at the Olympic village, and anti-Semitic magazines were sold on most street corners.

“The magazine has caricatures of hooked-nosed people, and it lays the blame for everything on the Jews,” my grandfather says. He said he got a sense of how bad the situation had become, “but not obviously as bad as it got later on.”

During the games, Patoo said he was thrilled to get the chance to meet James Naismith, who invented basketball in 1891. Naismith proudly watched his sport’s debut in the ‘36 Olympics. But the Germans didn’t seem to grasp the game and scheduled all the basketball competitions on outdoor dirt courts.

The final between U.S. and Canada was played during a torrential rainstorm.

“If you dribbled, it was a splash and it floated away,” recalls Patoo. By halftime, the score was only 15 to 4.

“These two teams supposedly consisting of the best in the world, and each scored only four points in the second half.”

The final score was 19 to 8.

What Patoo leaves out, but later tells my mom for the first time, is that he didn’t play in that final game. The U.S. team actually consisted of two seven-man squads, and they alternated games.

“It wasn’t our turn. It was the turn of the other group,” he haltingly admits. “We didn’t get medals until much later. Oh, we had a lot of beefs by the end of the games.”

My mom cuts in, “It was quite an inauspicious ending.”

That’s an understatement. Not only did Patoo not march before Hitler, as I had always imagined. He actually got his gold medal — not on a podium in front of the world — but out of his mailbox in Los Angeles.

The rest of her essay can be read and listened to here.

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The whole country had mixed feelings about validating the Nazi regime by participating. Avery Brundage, the American pro-Hitler, pro-Germany, pro-Nazi head of the International Olympic Committee made sure the games went on.

The real real Jewish Jesse Owens was Marty Glickman, track and football star at Syracuse U (later broadcast voice of MSG and the Knicks). He and fellow Jewish track star Sam Stoller (U. Michigan) were foaming at the mouth to beat Hitler, but were pulled from the 4x100-meter relay just before the race by the two coaches (Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell) for a cockamamie excuse and replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe who had won their medals (3 gold and a silver respectively) earlier on. Owens himself protested the injustice to Glickman but was overruled. Germany was easily beaten in the event. Owens and Glickman remained lifelong friends.

Glickman learned that Avery Brundage ... ‘believed that it was enough humiliation for Germany to have black Americans winning gold medals, but having Jews on the gold medal victory stand was too much’.

Hitler of course had arranged to appear to shake hands only with opening day winners before the lower humans and subhumans were scheduled to compete, courtesy of Brundage.

“In 1998, William J. Hyde, president of the United States Olympic Committee, citing: “I was a prosecutor. I’m used to looking at evidence. The evidence [of antisemitism] was there.”, presented Glickman and Stoeller (posthumously–he died in 1983) with a special plaque: “in lieu of the gold medals they didn’t win”.” Glickman died in 2001.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 8/11/08 at 11:34 am

However, antisemitism continues in the Olympic culture. In the 1972 Munich Olympics, the games inexplicably continued after the Israeli team was taken hostage and massacred by Arab terrorists. That would never have happened under reagan. It was in that Olympics that Mark Spitz earned his unprecedented seven golds, and was voted one the top five Olympians of all time. Spitz is convinced that had there been a 50M freestyle in his day, he would have won eight golds in 1972.

Typically, the Jews are still being written out of Olympic history. Spitz showed up at Athens four years ago to watch Phelps in his first try to beat his record but his face was never televised. This year, all of the top five Olympians still alive were invited to Beijing except for Spitz. The Committee has some ‘splainin’ to do.
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=afp-oly2008swimusaspitz&prov=afp&type=lgns

Comment by Ben Plonie on 8/11/08 at 12:44 pm

I appreciete the facts but it was hilarrious to think, try checking Beijing Olympics Complete Medal Tally 2008 for the newest info.

Comment by Frank Harry on 8/11/08 at 6:25 pm

The real real Jewish Jesse Owens was Marty Glickman, track and football star at Syracuse U (later broadcast voice of MSG and the Knicks). He and fellow Jewish track star Sam Stoller (U. Michigan) were foaming at the mouth to beat Hitler, but were pulled from the 4x100-meter relay just before the race by the two coaches (Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell) for a cockamamie excuse and replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe who had won their medals (3 gold and a silver respectively) earlier on. Owens himself protested the injustice to Glickman but was overruled. Germany was easily beaten in the event. Owens and Glickman remained lifelong friends.

Comment by Sportswear on 11/18/08 at 1:53 am

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