Men's Track and Field | February 24, 2020

Ira Davis' story has been told before. If you Google his name, you can read about his success as a track star for La Salle and the United States national team. He's a former American record holder in the triple jump, an IC4A champion, a Penn Relays champion, school record holder, and a selection to the (now defunct) Sport Magazine's All-Time Track and Field team. He's intertwined in local legend as a former teammate of Wilt Chamberlain on the Overbook High School basketball team.
 
He wants to tell a different story. Some will listen to it, others won't—he understands, but that's the opportunity of Black History Month as he sees it: the "ability to realize that there is a story to be told." 
 
As he continues, his speech is careful, thoughtful, probing. The words are weighed like that of a developer laying the foundation of a building.
 
"The story is not always told in a timely fashion, and lots of times the stories that can be told are not always available for minorities to reflect on. I have a story probably like every other black man…"
 
Davis begins in 1940s and 1950s Philadelphia in what he calls "a black community that was not the worst ghetto community but kind of a ghetto community." If you were born there, you likely stayed and lived your life there. Mobility was limited as there wasn't much of a connection to the world beyond neighborhood limits. Davis wasn't exposed to television, nor aware growing up of the people who would become his idols, Jesse Owens and longtime friend and "big brother," Herb Douglas. 
 
Though as you listen to Davis speak, there is a sense of fate. He was born in 1936, the year Owens was in Berlin at the Olympics. When Douglas was winning bronze at the 1948 Olympics in London, Davis earned his first track medal as a 12-year-old at Bell Creek playground. He'd meet these seminal role models down the road through the national team circuit, but it's a very real possibility he never would have if it wasn't for the path he took from Overbrook to La Salle.
 
Davis was a natural. A fast learner. But he had to learn—his lack of knowledge illustrated in exchanges with his coaches.
 
As a freshman in high school, he recalls going out for the track team and measuring 19 feet in the long jump. The coach, Derek Collins, approached him and said, "Ira if you keep that up one day you might make the Olympic team." Davis' response: "What's that?"
 
He was a talented runner, but he didn't have any offers from colleges and couldn't afford a higher education. Enlisting in the Marines seemed like his other option before a La Salle alum put him in touch with the Explorers head coach, Frank Wetzler. It was a match made in heaven. Wetzler, who would become a father figure, "knew more about the triple jump than any other coach in the country."
 
Davis got his start in the event because no one else really competed in the hop-step. It was something that athletes got dropped into when they couldn't make the cut in the other jumps—"a bastard event." But it so happened that the world record holder, Brazilian Adhemar da Silva, was coming to the States to compete in the Penn Relays. The freshman Davis was asked to participate in the triple jump. His response, again: "What's that?" 
 
After learning the event and straining a muscle in his first attempt, fresh-faced Davis was ready to compete alongside da Silva and a few other Olympians later in 1955. He'd finish fourth. He progressed quickly under the watch of Wetzler, notably jumping 47 feet to defeat former bronze medalist George Shaw at an Olympic Development meet—despite being advised not to compete in the triple jump because he "wasn't going to beat Shaw." After that, the pair turned their attention to the Olympics in 1956 and "the rest is history," Davis notes.
 
Traveling to Olney Avenue is one thing, traveling around the world is another. Davis didn't have Wetzler on the national team to bring him along, and although there were some coaches who respected him, "on a whole, they did not." As a triple jumper and as a black man, he was an outsider. He does admit that there weren't too many racial issues. Other teams respected him for his speed, and he was close with his teammates. As an American, the global reception was largely positive, but there were still moments that opened his eyes.
 
In 1959, he was chosen to partake in a goodwill tour to Africa. Ghana. Nigeria. South Africa. Rhodesia. He recalls approaching customs in Johannesburg: "Josh [Culbreath] and I were the only two blacks on the team. The coaches were white, the other athletes were white. We got up to go through customs to get on the plane thinking everything is fine, no big deal, I'm an American. I went to the front of the line, Josh was behind me, the rest of the team behind us, and customs made me get out of line. They made Josh get out also. They made us go to the back of the line. We were supposed to be stars, but still we were not accepted in a lot of ways."
 
This continued on to Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe) where the pair were warned that they might not be able to stay in the hotels. Although this didn't transpire, they do remember going to get haircuts and coming back to reporters and cameramen in the lobby. One man showed them a newspaper headline that read Davis and Culbreath Denied Haircuts, "which was not true, so we had to explain what had happened and how we were received graciously and whoever owned the article was lying." That reporter was fired and put out of the country.
 
Davis would go on to have a notable national team career when opportunity for the triple jump presented itself, which was not a lucrative lifestyle. He was making three dollars a day representing the USA. To support his wife and children, he persevered through workforce obstacles (including a bid-rigging attack by a white competitor) to become one of the most successful minority business owners in the Delaware Valley at the time, owning development and moving companies worth millions.
 
Now 83, Davis reflects on his path—the highs and lows, the triumphs and injustices. He defied expectations and broke barriers as an athlete, as one of the first black track and field head coaches of a major white university (when he took over at La Salle in 1976), and as La Salle's first black Hall of Athletes inductee. 
 
From all of this, Davis asks for reflection. He wants student-athletes to think about Black History Month, on those who have come before them and on the impact that can be made on those who come after. Understanding that there is an enduring power in the story that you can write.