Avery Brundage: The Enigmatic Man Behind the Modern Day Olympic Movement

Reprinted article by MIKE TAKEUCHI

Made a minor change on this in August 2012. Thank you for reading! 

"No Monarch has ever held sway over such a vast expanse of territory." International Olympic Committee President and onetime Montecito resident Avery Brundage in 1960.
Among the myriad descriptions of Avery Brundage -- champion of the amateur, dictator, shrewd businessman, womanizer, art collector, anti-Semite, generous donor, Nazi sympathizer -- one thing is certain: The controversial man was the most powerful sporting figure in the 20th century, and during his reign, he lived much of his time in the Santa Barbara area.
From 1946 to 1973, the president of the International Olympic Committee became a local fixture by owning several properties, including the Montecito Country Club, collecting rare Asian art, picking up civic awards, and enjoying high society. While simultaneously, as president of the International Olympic Committee, he was given unflattering nicknames like "Slavery Avery" for his iron-fisted rule when he lorded over his minions -- the athletes themselves.
Local resident and 1960 Olympian Jeff Farrell looked back on Mr. Brundage's life with mixed emotions. When Mr. Farrell won two gold medals for swimming in the 4 x 200 meter freestyle relay and the 4 x 100 medley relay, he alternately expressed pride in having Mr. Brundage award him with the medals, while expressing some rancor at the same man for preventing him from earning any money while training.
"He was the last caretaker of the thought that ... athletics should be for the wealthy," Mr. Farrell said.
In his recent book "Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World" author David Maraniss wrote that Mr. Brundage believed "that the Olympic movement in its reach and meaning, far surpassed any government, religion, or philosophy." And Mr. Brundage, in his roles first as leader of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and then later the IOC, was the one who wielded the iron fist to obsessively ensure that the Olympics were free from professionalism. He also later tried to bar women from competing and cancel the Winter Olympics. Both attempts were unsuccessful.
Born in Detroit on Sept. 28, 1887, Mr. Brundage was a fine athlete in his own right; he competed in the decathlon in the 1912 Olympics -- dropping out after eight events en route to a 16th-place finish.
The gold medal winner that year was none other than Jim Thorpe. After it was found that he played professional baseball, Thorpe was subsequently stripped of his medals. As an Olympic official, Mr. Brundage would later uphold the Native American athlete's ban.
While living in Chicago, Mr. Brundage's success as a construction and real-estate magnate paralleled his rise in world sport. The foundation for his rise in power occurred prior to the 1936 Berlin Olympics where Adolph Hitler wanted to prove his country's and the Aryan race's superiority. A young African American sprinter named Jesse Owens would resoundingly dispel the German dictator's theory.
Less known was Hitler's desire to exclude Jewish athletes and officials from the Games -- causing cries for a boycott from the United States. While stating publicly that this couldn't happen and that athletes of all races would get equal treatment, Mr. Brundage, who at the time was the U.S. Olympic Committee president, took a fact-finding mission to Germany where he was wined and dined by Hitler while being "convinced" that Jewish athletes wouldn't be excluded. Mr. Brundage later stated that he found no wrongdoing in Berlin -- an act that still rankles the Mr. Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer.
"He was most reprehensible in his anti-Semitism," Mr. Maraniss wrote in an e-mail. "Opposing the boycott is certainly defensible, but his actions were not. When I found letters he wrote to German officials beforehand bemoaning the 'Jewish cabal' and urging them to find positive articles about Hitler and the Nazis to overcome the negative stories that U.S. journalists were sending out of Germany -- that was too much."
Two years later, his company was awarded the building contract for the German Embassy in the United States because of "sympathy toward the Nazi cause."
A decade after Berlin and two Olympics cancelled because of World War II later, Mr. Brundage and his wife Elizabeth purchased the "Escondrijo" (Hiding Place) estate on Ashley Road in Montecito and renamed it La Pineta or The Pines. In a 1980 Sports Illustrated story by William Oscar Johnson, the home included zebra skin rugs, Olympic flags, priceless Asian art, and jade dishes. The home would later be destroyed in the 1964 Coyote Fire. The couple later moved to the Brunninghausen Estate on Hot Springs Road.
In 1946 he purchased the Montecito Country Club, followed in later years by the El Paseo and the Presidio areas in downtown Santa Barbara, as well as the Montecito Inn. While he enjoyed moderate success in his local businesses (he sold the Country Club in 1973 for over $4 million), much of his money was made from construction around the country.
Along the way he amassed Asian art from the Neolithic Period to the Ch'ing Dynasty -- most of which he donated to the City of San Francisco starting in 1959. The 7,700 piece collection, (which museum spokesperson Michele Dilworth declined to value) is housed in that city's Asian Art Museum.
During his residence here, he was showered with adulation, positive press and numerous awards. In 1949, Mr. Brundage was given the now discontinued Chamber of Commerce Excelentisimo Senor de Santa Barbara Award by Semana Nautica president, R.F. MacFarland. In accepting the award, Mr. Brundage lauded the summer sports festival for maintaining its dedication to amateur sports -- an irony not lost on an athlete like Mr. Farrell, who later served as the summer sports festival's president for several years.
"Mr. Brundage had banned an athlete (miler Wes Santee in 1956) for only taking expense money," Mr. Farrell said. "I remembered being worried that I was going to get in trouble for making five dollars and hour to teach swimming. Apparently it was OK to make money life guarding, but it wasn't okay to make money on swimming."
A 1968 article stated that "Mr. Amateur Sport" and the rest of the IOC board never charged the Olympic Committee a dime in expense money. At that time, he was worth more than $20 million.
"The executive committee members came from the ruling class -- millionaire, dukes, princes, and such," Mr. Maraniss said. "It was easy for them to talk about the purity of amateurism and how no one should be paid for sport -- because they didn't need the money."
Although he ruled with a strong hand, Mr. Brundage had his weaknesses. Among them were women. Many of his local deeds, including La Pineta, were put in the name of his lover and business partner Frances Blakely. While his wife stayed at home, he had many trysts, including fathering two children in 1951 and 1952 with a woman in Redwood City. Two years after Elizabeth Brundage died in 1971, he married Princess Mariann Charlotte Katharina Stefanie Reuss, a daughter of a prince of a German principality, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
Thirty six at the time, Princess Mariann was as vibrant as Mr. Brundage was sickly (exacerbated by the stress from the 1972 Olympics massacre) and lived a lavish life in Montecito and Germany.
"She was as nice as he wasn't," said an acquaintance who did not want to be named.
Mr. Brundage spent the remaining years of his life in poor health. He died in Germany on May 8, 1975, with considerably less money than he had prior to his second marriage. According to a Sports Illustrated story, Princess Mariann, at this time living with local insurance millionaire Donald Pate, successfully defended a Superior Court suit (presided by Judge Patrick McMahon) brought on by his longtime friend and chief financial adviser, Frederick J. Ruegsegger on expenditures made after Mr. Brundage's death. It was a fitting end to what Mr. Maraniss describes as a complicated man.
"I found Avery Brundage to be one of the most contradictory characters I've ever written about," Mr. Maraniss said. "He was not especially likeable, yet the fact that at some points in his career nearly every faction hated him for some (reason) or other seemed to me like a bit of a saving grace. There is something to be said for a person like that."
"His devotion to the Olympic Movement was greater than his belief in anything else. He truly believed that the Olympic Movement was greater than any ideology or religion. Perhaps this was a form of egomania, but at times it served him -- and the Olympics -- well. If nothing else, he kept the Olympics alive during the very difficult middle decades of the 20th century."