Stan Hochman: Raised fists felt round the world

SILENT GESTURE, that's what Tommie Smith had in mind when his wife bought the black gloves in Mexico City. Then he won the 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympics and he slithered his hand into the right glove and handed the left glove to John Carlos, who had finished third.

Silent gesture, indeed. No punches thrown, no bullets fired, no blood shed. Kaboom! Only trigger-quick punishment and the mushroom cloud of controversy and bitterness and anger that hovers to this day.

Two black athletes on the victory stand, shoeless, a clenched fist thrust into the Mexico City dusk, heads down while the anthem played. Prayer? Or defiance? The crowd gasped and the media mumbled and the Olympic brass growled in the 63 seconds it took to get to "land of the free and the home of the brave."

Forty years later and Carlos insists that the demonstration was his idea, not Smith's. Still insists that he intentionally slowed in the final 50 meters to allow Smith to win the race, creating a gash, a salt-rubbed wound that time cannot heal.

They snipe at each other, in interviews, in books. Perhaps they were unprepared for what happened to them. The instant response: tossed from the U.S. team, given 48 hours to leave the Olympic Village, sent home in shame. Unprepared for the bleak years that followed, the difficulty finding a satisfying job, the suicide of Carlos' wife.

Unprepared too, decades later, for changing times and changing moods, for the honorary degrees awarded them by San Jose State. And then, in 2005, for the 20-foot-high sculpture that the school erected depicting that memorable moment on the victory stand.

There's a fuzzy parallel to Muhammad Ali here. Ali refused to step forward in 1967 at the Houston induction center (his own rare silent gesture) and all hell broke loose. He was stripped of his boxing license before you could say Jack Johnson, forced into almost four years of boxing exile.

Smith and Carlos belonged to the Olympic Project for Human Rights. And one of their goals was to restore Ali's license to fight. Ali went from hated to beloved and ultimately was chosen to light the Olympic flame at the Atlanta games.