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view . summer 2012
Now, with the Olympic trip in doubt, he went back
to Ford, hat in hand, and walked out with the players
basketball dreams intact.
All except former Assumption star “Moose” Rogin, that
is. As a replacement player and not an official V8 member,
he wasn’t eligible for the sponsorship. Rogin couldn’t
muster the $500—a king’s ransom in those days—to make
the transatlantic trip.
“So I reluctantly had to drop out and it was a big
disappointment, the biggest of my life,” Rogin later told
Windsor historian Jonathan Plaut.
The 1936 Summer Olympic Games are remembered
for many things. That is where history was made by Jesse
Owens, the first black man to win an Olympic
gold medal.
The Games also provided a glimpse of Nazi Germany’s
public relations machine.
“The most astonishing sight was to see all of the
soldiers, the gun carriers, the guns,” said Ford V-8 player
Norm Dawson in the book,
The Olympians Among Us
.
“Seeing thousands of German soldiers stand up and shout,
‘Seig Heil!,’ ‘Seig Heil!’ When we got back to England and
told people what we had seen, they just laughed and said
war wouldn’t come…”
Stories of Jewish persecution had begun to reach
North American shores. According to the Vancouver
Holocaust Centre, many Jewish athletes chose to boycott
the Berlin Olympics in an effort to disprove Nazi racism.
Not Toots Meretsky.
In his article, “Berlin Olympics a breakthrough for
Canadian basketball,”
Ottawa Citizen
writer Tony Atherton
says that Meretsky had been the leading scorer in the
Canadian championship tournament and one of the star
players of the Canadian Olympic basketball team.
“Nothing was going to keep Meretsky from the
Olympics,” wrote Atherton, “including the fact that he
was the only Jewish member of a team bound for Hitler’s
Germany.” He was advised not to venture outside the
Olympic village.
Meretsky ignored the advice, wrote Atherton,
and observed that when he ventured into Jewish
neighborhoods in Berlin, “‘no one was on the streets, and
the shades were drawn. I knocked at a few doors and was
finally let in. It was obvious they were all scared.’”
In comparison, the drama of the gold medal basketball
game between Canada and the U.S. might have seemed
almost anti-climactic – but it wasn’t.
The players met on a clay court, not wood. The
clay was sodden and slippery after days of rain that had
postponed the tournament twice. Organizers decreed
that the final game would be played – rain or shine – on
August 14, 1936.
Atherton’s story includes the recollection of Canadian
player Gord Aitchison. “On the opening play, an American
player raced down the court, caught a pass as his feet went
from under him and completed the last 15 or 20 feet to the
basket sliding on the seat of his shorts, water spraying out
from both sides.”
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