The Coach: Ed Temple

Ed Temple came to Nashville from Pennsylvania in 1946 — drawn by a track scholarship to what was then called Tennessee A&I. He's never left.

He got his lifelong job almost by accident. He graduated in the spring of 1950, and thought he might like to go into coaching. But without a position, he stayed in the dorms while he searched — and then he was summoned to the school president's office.

"I thought I was in trouble," he says. But he wasn't — he was being offered a job.

"It paid $150 a month, but when you didn't have nothing, that was pretty good," he says.

The job would eventually make him a legend in Nashville and far beyond. By the time the 1960 Rome Olympics rolled around, Temple had turned the women's track program at Tennessee State University (as it was now called) into one of the nation's finest — a far cry from when he started, carrying three runners to one meet a year in a station wagon.

Temple had already spent a decade honing his charges' skills in the June and July Nashville heat, having them running on cinders, hands protected from the scorching surface by athletic tape. Three practices a day under the brutal Tennessee sun.

"It'd get you ready," Temple says.

And ready the Tigerbelles were: Wilma Rudolph won gold in the 100 and 200; the all-Tigerbelle relay team won gold in the 400.

And as Temple notes, "None of these girls were on scholarship."

Until he retired in 1994, after 44 years at the helm, he demanded the best from his runners on the track and off: "They all graduated. ... I've had none on welfare and none in jail."

As the civil rights movement swirled around him — he recalls sending his cross-country runners up a hill topped by a National Guard tank — and as Title IX put women's athletics on equal footing — a movement he credits Rudolph with starting — Temple remained.

He still maintains an office at the school he helped put on the map, and if you call, he'll tell you all his stories. There's the one about the Russian media peppering him with questions about segregation. And the one about the time the Tigerbelles dominated yet another Olympics, and he almost left the school he loves because he didn't get a raise: "We'd won more gold medals than 80 countries!" He'll tell you about his girls — they are all still "his girls," even now — practicing sprints in hotel hallways, and about all the presidents he's met.

But ask his secret, and he'll laugh.

"I wish I knew. You've got to have determination. These girls wanted to win. ... They were great. I was here with all the great ones, and I just said, 'I want you to prove you can do it.' "

They did.