JM: Back in the late 1960’s… Dick Fosbury was a tall, gangly 21 year old college student. He had tried to play football in high school but he was told he wasn’t strong enough.

MG: He tried to play basketball… but the coaches said he wasn’t athletic enough. Finally, though, Dick found his sport… the high jump.

And he got so good at it… he made it to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

JM: And there… Dick debuted something the world had never seen before.

Reynaldo Brown (RB): You had this new way of jumping.

Dick Fosbury (DF): Uh huh. The Fosbury Flop. (Laughs)

RB: (Laughs) The Fosbury Flop, you know.

DF: It was way different.

RB: Yeah. (Laughs)

MG: That’s Dick Fosbury with his Olympic teammate… Reynaldo Brown.

JM: Back then there were a lot of ways to jump over the bar… but Dick, who was studying engineering, applied his scientific brain and came up with something so counterintuitive that it almost didn’t make sense.

He went over the bar backwards.

MG: He’d jump, twist his body in mid air, sail over the bar and land on his back… with a flop.

The move was so successful… that’s what everybody does today.

MUSIC END

JM: But there in that stadium in 1968… it looked ridiculous.

<MUSIC>

DF: As I warmed up the crowd started to notice.

RB: They did. I remember that.

DF: You know, there’s this strange guy…

RB: …doing something.

DF: And as we started the competition, they kept raising the bar, jumping higher and higher. More people started to watch, and…

RB: I remember the stadium just getting quieter and quieter each time we’d go, you know.

DF: Shhhhhhhhhhhh.

RB: Yeah. (Laughs) Give this guy a chance, you know.

MG: And what everybody was watching was Dick Fosbury jumping higher than anyone else had done in the history of the Olympics…

DF: I won a gold medal, and that was my only Olympic Games that I competed in.

MG: But even so….as the world turns its eyes to the Summer Games in Paris… if you watch the high jump, everyone will be doing the Fosbury Flop.

I’m Michael Garofalo.

JM: And I’m Jasmyn Morris. It’s the StoryCorps podcast from NPR.

<BEAT>

MG: When people come to StoryCorps… they tend to talk about the things that give their life meaning… and for a lot of people… that thing is sports.

JM: So we’re calling this season – Game Changers… In some cases… like Dick’s… it’s about one person changing a sport forever… but sports can also change the people who play them, watch them, work in and around them…

MG: We’ll hear from people who set records, lost with grace, and had to fight just to be in the game.

JM: The people who chose to flop instead of jump…

MG: … and the people who chose to jump… when everyone else stayed on the ground.

Anne Brande (AB): Kenny, I’d like you to talk about your jump shot.

KS: My jump shot?

AB: Yeah.

KS: I started shooting my jump shot back in about 1934…35 probably. You could say that was the start of it.

JM: Kenny Sailors is the originator of the jump shot in basketball… and he spoke with his friend Anne Brande…

KS: The game was a little different back in those days. Everybody shot two-handed shots. The two-handed shot was excellent but you needed to have both feet on the floor when you shot it.

MG: That meant shorter players like Kenny were at a disadvantage. So when his big brother introduced him to the sport on their farm in Wyoming in 1935… he needed a way to make up the difference.

KS: I started out learning about the game of basketball on that old farm down in Hillsdale with my brother, who incidentally was an outstanding ball player, probably the most outstanding one Hillsdale had had up until that time. He wanted me to play too, and, of course, I was just a punk kid. And so he put a basket, a hoop, it didn’t have any net on it. And ah, he’d work out against me sometimes, even though he was five years older.

And of course, the good lord must have put it in my mind, that if I’m going to get up over this big bum so I can shoot, I’m going to have to jump. That was a matter of necessity, my brother being 6’5 and I was probably about 5’7. It probably wasn’t very pretty, but I got the shot off. And it went in. And, uh, I think he was as surprised as I was. And ah, Bud says, ”Boy you better develop that. That’s going to be a good shot”. So I started working on it.

The NBA started up in 1946, and I signed up with Cleveland, in that day, nobody jumps, you see, everybody had to keep both feet on the floor or the coach would take you out of the ball game. And I was out there scrimmaging or playing around before the season started and, of course, my first coach was old ’Dutch” Dehnert, an old-time ball player. And old Dutch is on the side, I saw him sitting over there watching us. And when we got all done, he said, ’Sailors, where’d you get that leaping one hander?’ And I said, ’Well Dutch, I don’t know, I’ve been shooting that for a long time.’ And he says, ’You’ll never go in this league with that shot’. (Laughs) Well, I thought boy my career was over with right now (Laughs).That’s kind of how it all came about.

And, uh, to this day, I get several letters a week as a rule. They’ll ask me questions like, uh, ’Did you really start the jump shot?’ What am I going to say, you know? I usually, when I write back, I say, ’Well Ray Myer from DePaul, who coached there for many many years, he said it the best I think. He said, ’Sailors might not have been the first player to jump in the air and shoot the ball, but he developed the shot that is being used today.’ That’s the way he put it. I like that.

<MUSIC>

JM: Kenny Sailors played in the NBA for five years. He died in 2016.

<MUSIC OUT>
MG: From the father of the jump shot… to the person known as “the mother of women’s judo.”
JM: Her name was Rusty Kanokogi… She was a Martial Arts champion, originally from Coney Island in Brooklyn.
MG: Her daughter Jean Kanokogi came to StoryCorps to remember the toughest woman she ever knew…
Jean Kanokogi: My mom was five foot nine, her legs were built like cinder blocks, and her voice would wrap all around you. It was gritty. It was booming. And when she spoke, she was very matter of fact.
Rusty Kanokogi: You don’t have to look like Hercules to have strong shoulders. If your body’s strong, your brain is strong, then maybe you can get along in life with everything.
Jean Kanokogi: There were no excuses that Rusty would accept. She said, unless you’re dead, do another push up. So we would do another push up.
<MUSIC FADES IN>
JM: Today, women’s judo is an Olympic sport… but it actually wasn’t allowed in until 1988…
MG: And the only reason it got in… was because of Rusty.
JM: And we’ll find out how she did it after the break. Stay with us…
<MUSIC OUT>
<BREAK>
MG: Welcome back. Rusty Kanokogi was born Rena Glickman to a Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1935.
JM: And her daughter, Jean, said she had it pretty rough.
Jean Kanokogi: She came up in a very tumultuous childhood where her parents would fight. Her mom, my grandmother, was constantly working in Coney Island in a candy factory. And my grandfather, her father, he was absent and he was an alcoholic and a gambler. So he took the family money and he would spend it. So she learned to be independent and she learned to survive on the street.
A lot of people think that her name, Rusty, was because she had this strong red hair. Actually, she took the name Rusty from a street dog.
<MUSIC FADE IN>
Rusty was a survivor. Rusty was a fighter. Rusty prevailed over everyone. And Rusty got what Rusty needed to persevere on the street.
JM: As a teen, she led a street gang… and in 1955, a friend came to her and said he wanted to show her a technique that he’d picked up from his judo class at the YMCA.
Rusty Kanokogi: And when he picked me up on his hip like I was a piece of paper, that was it. This was magic to me. I could always fight, but this was something really different.
The men I worked with at the time, they really didn’t know how to take me, but, uh, I think it was my trying spirit that really let them work with me. And I was one of the people selected to be on the official team from that Y.
Jean Kanokogi: But she was constantly running into barriers, being told no.
Her first judo tournament was in 1959. It was the YMCA Judo Championships in Utica, New York. Women weren’t allowed to compete back then. So, she went with the men that she was training with just to warm up with them. But then she heard a snap and then a loud yell across the mat. It was one of her teammates.
Her coach came to her and said, ‘Rusty, I need you to take the place of this teammate. He can’t compete. Otherwise we’ll forfeit. So I’m going to put you in, but do not call attention to yourself. Don’t let anybody see that you’re a woman.’
She was big and strong, she was very androgynous looking. So nobody really knew the difference. She bows in with her opponent, her opponent comes in on a judo technique and they both fumble to the ground, pretty much like a fist fight with judo techniques and some rules. She throws this big guy for a full point and wins her judo match.
As she’s walking out of the judo venue with her gold medal placed around her neck, the tournament director comes up to her and says, ‘Are you a girl? Girls can’t compete in judo. I need that medal back.’ She said, ‘No, this is mine. I won it fair and square.’ He said, ‘No, I’m sorry. Otherwise, your team will forfeit their first place win.’
She decided to take that medal from around her neck, and she described to me that she felt that she did everything wrong just for being a woman. But then she also described that she felt this anger that she never felt before. She didn’t believe that any woman deserved to have that feeling because they wanted to compete.
<MUSIC FADE IN>
MG: By 1962, Rusty had run out of ways to advance in Judo here in the U.S… so, she traveled to Japan to study at the Kōdōkan, the world headquarters of Judo. That’s where she met Jean’s father… her future husband, martial artist Ryohei Kanokogi.
JM: They came back to the States and got married… and Rusty became a judo instructor in New York City…
Rusty Kanokogi: Got to teach the kids how to handle themselves. Get rid of the muggers. [to her students] They don’t pick on the strong, they pick on the weak. And each time, each time you giggle, and each time you cheat on your exercise, that’s another reason to get picked on. Do you understand?
MG: One of her students…Eve Aronoff Trivella…. went on to compete in the Olympics. She told Jean how she first fell in love with the sport.
Jean Kanokogi: Why did you get into judo?
Eve Aranoff Trivella: When I was a little girl, six years old, I had strep throat and from strep it turned into rheumatic fever. So for a few years, I actually couldn’t walk. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to do but drag myself around the house and watch TV.
And I would see these commercials that were on quite often for martial arts, one being judo. I fell in love with the beautiful judo throw: One man throwing another man, slow motion. And I looked at it, and I said, wow, how cool would it be if I could throw somebody across the room like that? I want to learn how to do that.
When I got better, I asked my mother to take me to a local judo school.
Jean Kanokogi: Rusty was, kind of, a mother to you too, as well as a coach.
Eve Aranoff Trivella: Well, she was a lot to me. The first time I saw your mom, I was between 10 and 11 years old. I was at a judo training camp. And I saw this redheaded woman who reeked power. The strength, the presence. I said, ‘Who is that woman? I wanna know her, I wanna meet her, I wanna be her.’
And my friend said, ‘That’s Rusty Kanokogi, and she’s probably the strongest woman you’ll ever meet on and off the mat.’ And she was right.
Your mother was up all night, on the phone, fighting for women’s judo, talking to people from Japan, Europe, all over the world.
Rusty Kanokogi: My name is Rusty Kanokogi from Brooklyn, New York. I have sent several letters with no response trying to find out why women’s judo was not included in the Goodwill Games.
Eve Aranoff Trivella: She was in the kitchen with that long cord, walking around the table, there was no room to eat on it, papers all over it. This was…this was what she did.
Jean Kanokogi: I remember seeing you at the dojo. And Then my mother said, ‘Eve, Jean, Jean, Eve, go work out.’ And it was one of those when Rusty tells you, ‘go be friends, go work out,’ you listen, because you just trust that she knew, and clearly she did.
JM: While Rusty trained Eve and Jean at her dojo, she was also fighting the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, to get women’s judo into the Olympics.
MG: When they told her no because women’s judo wasn’t internationally competitive… she mortaged her house and funded the first-ever Women’s World Judo Championships, featuring athletes from all over the world… But it still wasn’t enough.
Jean Kanokogi: She thought that women’s judo would be a shoe-in for the 1984 Olympics, especially since it was in Los Angeles.
I remember Rusty sitting in the kitchen. With her head in her hands, probably tears coming down her eyes, but she didn’t let anybody see. She just got the phone call saying women’s judo will not be included.
And at one point, my father walked over, and he said to her, ‘We’ve come this far. You don’t stop.’ She looked at my father and said, ‘I don’t intend to.’
JM: Finally, after years of trying… Rusty threatened to sue the IOC for discrimination… and that did it.
In 1988, they allowed women’s judo into the Olympics for the first time. Rusty coached the U.S. team… and Eve competed under her.
Eve Aranoff Trivella: Your mother was such a tough woman, to say the least. The more resistance, the more fight Rusty would have in her.
Jean Kanokogi: You fueled her because she wanted you to have that chance. She wanted her student, you to walk in next to her, at the 88 games into that Olympic stadium.
Eve Aranoff Trivella: I remember that moment. The tunnel is kind of dark and you go to the end of the tunnel and you see the light, so to speak. We walked in and, you know, it’s so big and there’s such a large crowd. You just hear all the cheering and screaming and yelling and they have the American flag up and they’re clapping and she stood there, chest out, head up, beaming with glory. She did it. She did it.
Jean Kanokogi: I remember I asked her, ‘Did you ever feel cheated for not having your shot at the Olympics? How would you have done?’ And, of course, she said, ‘I would have won.’
[both laugh]
<MUSIC>
MG: Rusty Kanakogi died in 2009. Just a few months before, the YMCA had given her a gold medal for her lifetime achievements… and to make up for taking one away from her… 50 years earlier.
JM: That’s all for this episode of the StoryCorps Podcast. It was produced by Jud Esty-Kendall and Max Jungreis.
MG: Amy Drozdowska is our Executive Producer… our Technical Director is Jarrett Floyd… and our fact checker is Katie Scott. The art for this season was created by Liz McCarty.

JM: Special thanks to Producer Vanara Taing… and facilitators Rachel Falcone and Zazil Davis-Vazquez.

We’re loving hearing the stories that listeners are leaving on our voicemail… and this week, we want to know: Who’s been a game changer in your life? Do you have a Rusty? Leave us a voicemail of your story at 702-706-TALK.

MG: That’s 702-706-T-A-L-K… I’m Michael Garofalo.

JM: And I’m Jasmyn Morris. Thanks for listening…