How the US caved to antisemitism and snubbed a Jewish Olympian at 1936 Berlin Games
In new book ‘Marty Glickman,’ historian and professor Jeffrey Gurock unlocks the life of a sports hero and announcer whose proud Jewish identity was a model for countless young fans
Reporter at The Times of Israel
For New Yorkers of a certain generation, Marty Glickman epitomized sports broadcasting, coining several phrases including his trademark call of “Swish!” when a basketball player hit nothing but net.
Yet Yeshiva University Prof. Jeffrey Gurock insists that his new biography of Glickman isn’t a sports book — at least, not a conventional one.
The book’s title might indicate otherwise. “Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend” is described in a release as “the first comprehensive biography” of its subject. Within its pages is a multifaceted portrait of Glickman, who died in 2001 at the age of 83.
“I am an American Jewish historian,” Gurock clarified. “I use Glickman’s story as a way of understanding more than just sports.”
Gurock calls his subject “a great athlete, a great sportscaster, and more importantly, an emblematic second-generation American Jew. As people read the book, they will learn a lot about what the Jews of America went through, issues of their life, through the metaphor of sport, through the personality of Marty Glickman.”
In his research, Gurock was aided by some of the many sports broadcasters who were in some way mentored by Glickman, including Marv Albert, Bob Costas, and women’s broadcasting pioneer Gayle Sierens.
A former high school and collegiate athletic standout, Glickman called 2,000 games in his broadcasting career across the sports spectrum, from basketball to rodeo. In 1936, as a member of the US Olympic team, he was at the center of a controversy during that year’s Summer Games in Berlin when he was one of two Jewish-American athletes replaced at the last minute on the US 4×100 relay squad.
“Up until that moment in his life, everything had gone well for him as a Jew,” Gurock noted.
Gurock is the author of 25 books, including a previous account of the chosen people and the playing fields — “Judaism’s Encounter with American Sport.” In “Marty Glickman,” he revisits a golden era of Jewish athletic achievement in the early 20th century, when Jews were prominent in urban sports such as boxing and basketball. In 1946, when the New York Knicks debuted as a professional basketball team, there were seven Jews in the lineup, with Glickman calling the games.
Gurock said that Glickman was best-known for his broadcasts of the Knicks and college basketball at Madison Square Garden, and for pro football games with the New York Giants and Jets. His resume also included some New York Rangers hockey games.
“He would do a Giants football game, then take the subway down to Madison Square Garden in the evening to do a basketball game,” Gurock said, adding that the lineup also included “roller derby, the trotters at Yonkers, rodeo — 2,000 games, almost every sport.”
A too Jewy Jew
Gurock’s book opens with an account of a riveting Giants game that spotlights Glickman’s skill as a broadcaster. In the waning moments of a 1969 matchup against the Minnesota Vikings, Glickman advised fans listening on their car radios to pull over to the side of the road — and that’s exactly what they did.
“As a kid,” Gurock recalled, “I listened to him all the time. Everybody of my generation did. You didn’t have to be Jewish.
“Once in a while, he would speak Yiddish — ‘the meshugana ran for five yards.’ If you’re a Jew and someone says, ‘the meshugana ran for five yards,’ he’s sending us a message — being Jewish is something important. I think his Jewishness is important as well.”
The book delves into some of the nuances of the Jewish American narrative — including why this New York mainstay arguably did not become a nationally known figure.
Gurock posits that in the mid-20th century, two Jewish leaders of the fledgling Basketball Association of America — today’s NBA — were reluctant to make their new organization seem too Jewish to Middle America, and did not tap Glickman to broadcast their Game of the Week. The book also notes that Glickman declined pressure to change his name to make it seem less Jewish.
Such pressure to change an ethnic-sounding name was not limited to Jews among minority populations: Italian American sports broadcaster Sal Marchiano recounted something similar to Gurock. When Marchiano kept his name, it delighted a boyhood idol, Frank Sinatra.
“Historians talk about Jews changing their name to make it in America,” said Gurock, whose book notes that Marv Albert was born Marvin Aufrichtig, while longtime Yankees broadcaster Mel Allen changed his name from Melvin Allen Israel.
Glickman’s parents were Romanian Jewish immigrants. He grew up first in the Bronx, then in Brooklyn, where the “Flatbush Flash” starred in track and football for James Madison High School. The author estimated that three of every four of his high school classmates were Jewish. In football, Glickman began a rivalry with another New York Jewish sports legend — Sid Luckman of Erasmus Hall High School.
When it came time for college, Glickman opted for an upstate destination, Syracuse University. Members of a Jewish fraternity had recruited him. They were successful in their pitch, but unsuccessful in their broader purpose — they hoped that a Jewish sports star on campus might convince the university to lessen the anti-Jewish quotas that Syracuse and other universities had installed.
When the US caved to antisemites
During his time at Syracuse, Glickman got a shot at Olympic glory as a member of the American 4×100 relay team. The team included a fellow Jew — Sam Stoller — and Black standouts Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe.
Glickman had been enjoying himself in Berlin, although there was a tense moment. He and another Jewish Olympian, baseball player Herman Goldberg, had hitched a ride with a Wehrmacht lieutenant. When the officer asked for their autographs, they scribbled their signatures so he would not recognize their Jewish names. Then came crushing disappointment for Glickman and Stoller.
As the book explains, the duo were replaced by Owens and Metcalfe the day before the race. The move resulted in a record-setting American win. Yet Gurock wonders about the motives for the substitutions, given the antisemitism of Hitler’s Germany.
He has harsh words for Avery Brundage, the US Olympic Committee president at the time. (He also faults Brundage for his conduct 36 years later, when he was the International Olympic Committee president during the horror of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes died following an attack and hostage-taking by Palestinian terrorists.) The author criticizes another figure from the 1936 Games — Dean Cromwell, a coach for the US Olympic track team in Berlin.
“This guy, Cromwell, was an American Nazi, as was Avery Brundage,” Gurock said.
Cromwell wrote in a 1941 book that “the Negro athlete excels because he is closer to the primitive.” Brundage was a confessed antisemite and admirer of Hitler, who spoke at a pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden and was a member of the America First Committee.
Conversely, Gurock had praise for Owens’s reaction to the late substitutions.
“Jesse Owens jumps up and says, ‘I’ve got three gold medals already, I don’t need a fourth,’” Gurock said. “He was told, ‘Sit down and shut up.’ It was a searing moment for Marty Glickman. He finally experienced antisemitism, which so many other Jews faced.”
Return to Berlin
Researching the book, Gurock came across an article about the controversy in the Brooklyn Eagle — Glickman’s hometown paper.
“After Glickman was turned away, they interviewed his father, who was going to make a big deal over this,” Gurock said. “His wife said no, don’t push the envelope, be quiet.” The author added that at the time, Glickman himself was “very reluctant” to speak about it.
Decades later, in 1985, Glickman’s stance changed. A key step was his return to Berlin and its Olympic Stadium for a documentary about Owens. He saw a historical photo of Hitler and two top Nazis — Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goring — watching the 1936 Games at the stadium.
“He realized he was still alive and they were dead,” Gurock said. “It changed him, to some extent.”
The mid-1980s also coincided with the project to create a Holocaust museum in the US, which the author cites as another influence on Glickman.
“The last 16 years of his life, he traveled the country, talking about what happened to him, about antisemitism,” Gurock said. “I say Glickman was a sportscaster, a Jew, an athlete. At the end of the day, he was a teacher.”
