Apparently the 1968 gold medalist, Tommie Smith, is selling his 1968 gold medal which he protested as pictured above.
I raise this issue in part because of its relevance to Mep lore: my senior year, then Brandeis coach Greg Wilson ran a case in the demo round about not stripping Smith and Carlos of their medals and not booting them from the Olympics. Clearly they got their medals back eventually, or Smith would likely have nothing to sell. It was a pretty sweet round, if memory serves.
But it’s also interesting to raise the issue of auctioning off such a powerful piece of memorabilia. Yesterday, the radio told me that former Cubs pitcher Mike Remlinger was auctioning off Sammy Sosa’s corked bat, which he had squirreled away at some point during that infamous game. Are sports stars simply on hard times? Everyone is, so it would stand to reason that they are struggling as well.
Ultimately, these auctions probably go well as long as the people with the deepest pockets also have the best motivations – i.e. museums or caretakers of the public trust. But the profit motive does a very poor job of guaranteeing those outcomes. Someone could whimsically decide to buy it for any number of reasons, including to destroy it as a move for jingoistic misunderstanding of the original gesture. Obviously that’s extreme and unlikely, but the fact remains that it will not necessarily be in good hands just because someone wants to spend money on it.
Which is not to criticize Tommie Smith so much – I can understand wanting to recover its value before he dies and turn something charged with negative emotions into something tangible. But there’s got to be a better system for liquidating items and still ensuring those items don’t actually get liquidated from our collective memory.
I think I just thought of another debate case.
