Author: '60 Olympics brought Games into modern world

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The subtitle of David Maraniss' new book, "Rome 1960" (Simon & Schuster), is "The Olympics That Changed the World."
Maraniss acknowledges that the subtitle -- the publisher's idea -- is hyperbolic, but says he's happy to defend it. Maraniss says the 1960 Games did mark a turning point in Olympic and sports history.
"You see the ushering in of the modern world, for better for worse," he says in an interview at CNN Center.
Maraniss observes the Rome Games were a coming-out party for a country, Italy, defeated 15 years earlier in World War II, and the rest of a rebuilding continental Europe. It was also the first Olympics commercially televised in America -- if on a limited basis, given that film had to be flown across the Atlantic each night for broadcast the next day. (The American broadcaster, CBS, paid the princely sum of $600,000 for the American rights, a fee that wouldn't even buy the average 30-second ad on NBC in 2008.)
The Games showcased what would become the shoe wars -- a German, Armin Hary, wore Puma during the race and Adidas on the medal stand in an effort to play both sides.
The competition also included the first confirmed use of doping in the Olympics, when a Danish bicyclist, Knud Enemark Jensen, passed out during a road race in the scorching Italian sun. Jensen died hours later, the cause eventually traced to a blood-circulation drug.
The Rome Olympics also had political resonance, Maraniss adds. The Soviet Union, which had only joined the Olympic movement in the 1950s, had been embarrassed by its team's performance at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. The Soviets were determined to exploit the propaganda value of their athletes, promoting achievements at every turn -- particularly at the expense of the United States, which was still grappling with how to showcase its African-American and women athletes when each group faced resistance at home.
"The Cold War had a profound impact on blacks and women in the United States," says Maraniss. Watch Maraniss talk about the Games' significance »
Though the team was full of gifted black athletes, he notes -- including Rafer Johnson, Ralph Boston, Wilma Rudolph and her fellow Tennessee State Tigerbelles, and John Thomas -- these same athletes suffered from discriminatory laws in America and were keenly aware of attitudes overseas, where they were treated as equals by their international hosts. And women's athletics, in those days long before Title IX, were an afterthought.
Maraniss, who says the Olympics were "a huge part of my childhood," was fascinated by this microcosm of a changing world. "This book [was] a way to illuminate history and sociological changes through politics and sport," he says.
The Games were rich with characters. Besides Johnson, the famed decathlete who became the first African-American to lead an American delegation in the Games, and Rudolph, the runner who overcame a sickly childhood to win three gold medals in Rome, there was an 18-year-old boxer who "was like an obstreperous little brother" to his teammates, Maraniss says. After Cassius Clay won the light-heavyweight gold medal, the world would come to know his bigger-than-life personality -- particularly after he became known as Muhammad Ali.
Maraniss was also intrigued by now-forgotten athletes and their Olympic stories. One, the talented runner Dave Sime -- he won a silver medal in the 100 meters -- was recruited by the CIA to help convince a Russian long jumper, Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, to defect. Sime's attempt was ruined by an overbearing agent known as Mr. Wolf who frightened Ter-Ovanesyan at a restaurant meeting.
Another, Joe Faust, finished in 17th place in the high jump but to Maraniss defined an Olympic ideal -- one of thousands of athletes who may not medal but simply give their all in competition.
Faust, who once considered becoming a Trappist monk, saw high-jumping as a spiritual activity, Maraniss says. "He would rise in penance and fall in gratitude," he observes. Today Faust, now in his mid-60s, lives in an adobe house on the side of a hill, a spartan domain with books, a computer, a filing cabinet and a sofa bed. While visiting him, Maraniss noticed the backyard -- a small area mostly filled with junk. But at the bottom, the author says, "there was a mattress, two poles and a crossbar," where Joe Faust can continue his spiritual education.
Some of 1960's figures became stars. Jim McKay, the former Baltimore newspaperman who CBS used to present its films, was soon hired away by ABC's Roone Arledge and became that network's face of sports for the next three decades. Rudolph's fame was such that, upon returning to her native Clarksville, Tennessee, she forced the Jim Crow town to integrate a parade honoring her.
Others have seen their reputations decline. Avery Brundage, the imperious American head of the International Olympic Committee, has become identified with the worst aspects of Olympian elitism. "I tried to give Brundage his humanity, but in many ways he's reprehensible," says Maraniss, noting Brundage's anti-Semitism, petty defenses of amateurism ("Slavery Avery," some athletes called him) and general pomposity.
"He does have his defenders -- he kept the Olympics together, and his belief in the Olympic movement was strong," Maraniss says. "I can accept that and still believe he was a complete jerk."
Maraniss, the author of biographies of football coach Vince Lombardi, baseball player Roberto Clemente and President Bill Clinton, is now pondering biographies of two other notables: Barack Obama and Billie Jean King. Politics and sports -- is there anything else he'd like to try?
"I love history, sociology, politics and sports. I'm not worried about being pigeonholed by that," he says. "It's a pretty broad spectrum."