Ed Temple, Iconic TSU and USA Olympic Track Coach, Dies

NASHVILLE, TN — Ed Temple, the iconic coach of the Tennessee State Tigerbelles and United States Olympic track teams, died late Thursday. He was 89.

Temple, a native of Pennsylvania, came to Nashville on a track scholarship at what was then Tennessee A&I in 1946. He never left. After graduating, he was offered a job coaching women's track for $150 per month. From those early teams — which consisted of three runners attending one meet a year — he sowed the seeds for a phenomenal run of success that brought international renown to his alma mater.

After a decade of success at TSU — where it was he who named the track team the Tigerbelles — Temple was asked to coach the Olympic team in Rome in 1960, where Clarksville's Wilma Rudolph won gold in the 100 and 200 meter dash and an all-TSU team won the 400.

And, at the time, these women who Temple trained on cinder tracks and in the heat and humidity of a Tennessee summer, were not on scholarship. Because, until after the Olympics, there were no scholarships for women runners at TSU. Temple, accompanied by legendary Nashville Banner sportswriter Fred Russell, went to Gov. Buford Ellington after returning from Rome.

"Governor Ellington invited me down and I talked about how we'd won Olympic medals and set world records - we'd done everything we possibly could. We just didn't have no athletics scholarships. We had work-aids. (Ellington) picked up that phone and when I got back to campus we had athletic scholarships," Temple told the NashvillePost last year.

He led the American team again in 1964 and was named the coach for the 1980 team, which did not compete in the Moscow games due to a boycott.

All told, Americans won 23 medals under Temple. Rudolph was the first American woman to win three track and field gold medals in a single Olympics. Rudolph's successor of sorts at both TSU and for the USA, Wyomia Tyus, won gold in 100 in 1964 at the age of 19 and then became the first woman to repeat in the event when she won in Mexico City in 1968.

In a 2012 interview with the Nashville Scene, Temple said he only thought about leaving TSU once: after returning from another dominant performance by the Tigerbelles in the 1964 Olympics and being unable to get a raise from the school.

"We'd won more gold medals than 80 countries!" he said. "We" in this case was not the United States, it was TSU.

Temple retired from coaching in 1994, after 44 years and 24 national titles for TSU, seeing the school and the city around it through Jim Crow and integration — he once led a cross-country practice that included a run up a hill topped by a National Guard tank — and seeing women's sports became ever more popular, a movement he credits Rudolph with starting.

Temple bragged that all of his runners graduated, and that "I've had none on welfare and none in jail."

Temple was a member of the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame, Tennessee State University Hall of Fame, National Track and Field Hall of Fame, Ohio Valley Conference Hall of Fame, Harrisburg Central Area Chapter Hall of Fame, Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, Black Athletes Hall of Fame and Communiplex National Sports Hall of Fame. A statue of Temple was unveiled last year outside First Tennessee Park.

Temple maintained an office — and even kept office hours —in TSU's library nearly to the end of his life, the walls of his space completely covered in memorabilia and photographs, a tangible version of the legacy he leaves to the school he never left.

Image via Tennessee State University.