A chat with the grandson of the Knoxville's first Olympian

by Jack Neely

A year-and-a-half ago I wrote a column about Ebenezer Alexander (1851-1910), the Knoxville-raised classics professor who, if he wasn't exactly the Father of the Modern Olympics, was at least the Uncle.

Alexander taught at UT until a hardheaded, vocational-minded administration gutted UT's classics program in 1886. He fled to UNC, where his courtly manner and his facility with Greek struck some as ambassadorial. In 1893, President Cleveland appointed the classics professor Minister to Greece, Serbia, and Rumania. By 1895, he was thickly involved in the Baron Pierre de Coubertin's unlikely efforts to revive the ancient Olympic Games. Alexander's credited with getting America to be one of the few nations to participate in the 1896 Athens Games. He's also on record as the first to support the Olympic movement financially. He's buried in Old Gray beneath a ponderous granite stone that's carved TEACHER ADMINISTRATOR DIPLOMAT.

When I wrote that story 18 months ago, I didn't expect to get a call from the statesman's grandson. Ebenezer Alexander bears the name of his father and grandfather and a few others before that. (He thinks he's the 7th, and goes by Eben, as most modern Ebenezers do.) At 85, he's a neurologist still on the teaching staff at Wake Forest and on the board of a few neurological journals.

He hasn't lived in Knoxville since 1926 and has mixed memories of the place. His parents enrolled him in dance classes; he preferred football. He recalls the neighborhood team he joined, circa 1925: the Circle Park Juniors, they called themselves. Alexander remembers the team posing for a photograph on the rock in Circle Park where they played, long before the park had anything to do with a university campus.

He remembers the pre-TVA floods, and the big logs and dead horses that would drift through Knoxville afterwards. "Knoxville was a dirty city," he says. "You knew if you wore a white shirt and went downtown, you'd come back with streaks of black on it. You'd have to blow your nose to get it all cleared out. It was not a well-run city; there was a lot of crookery."

Alexander's parents shipped him off to McCallie when he was 13; after than, he only returned to visit. But he enjoys those visits and likes Knoxville much better now than he did when he was 12. "Knoxville's one of the most improved cities in America. Pittsburgh included."

Ambassador Alexander died three years before neurosurgeon Alexander was born, but Dr. Alexander spent much of his youth in the company of his grandfather's spirit. When he attended UNC around 1930, his grandfather remained a formidable presence there. The younger Alexander took Greek from an idolatrous former student of his grandfather's. "It was almost overbearing," Dr. Alexander recalls, "how monumental he was"—even 20 years after his death. The ambassador was known, among other things, for his courtly habits. Sitting on his front porch as a lady strolled by, he'd stand and tip his hat. Once when he observed a student chewing tobacco on the back row and spitting on the floor, the professor-diplomat quietly drew out a clean handkerchief and mopped it up.

Professor Alexander was small and thin, sometimes frail, and smoked a pipe. Dr. Alexander doesn't think his grandfather was ever a competitive athlete. Still, he could perform some remarkable physical feats. At least twice the professor walked all the way from Chapel Hill to Knoxville, camping with Cherokees along the way. According to family legend, Alexander was so nimble, he could walk down a dusty road without raising enough of a cloud to get his trousers dirty.

Once Dr. Alexander opened a bureau owned by his grandfather. "The smell of pipe tobacco was very pungent," he says. Dr. Alexander's father, a respected local surgeon, blamed tobacco for his diplomat father's sudden death of a heart attack in downtown Knoxville. The younger Dr. Alexander is skeptical, believing it was the result of the congenital heart irregularity he suffered at the same age. A pacemaker, he thinks, might have saved him.

If his family knew Ebenezer Alexander's contribution to the modern Olympics, they didn't brag. "Even when I was growing up, the Olympics just weren't all that big," Dr. Alexander says. Most of what he knows about his grandfather he's learned through his own research.

Most of the participants in the first Olympic Games were Europeans; pragmatic Americans had to be convinced. "Coubertin contacted my grandfather because he was the U.S. ambassador," says Dr. Alexander. "He thought it was the best bet to get the Americans involved." Alexander put the word out, and a group of Ivy League athletes organized a team and came to Greece. The Americans' presence made the Olympics seem much more like a world event, not just another quaint European conceit.

"None of them knew what the hell they were doing," Dr. Alexander says of the first American Olympians. "They practiced in the nude because they'd seen these ancient vases depicting nude athletes." After their arrival in Greece, they were told they could wear clothes.

Ambassador Alexander kept them out of trouble. "Somebody said he even gave every one of them a pistol, to protect themselves," Dr. Alexander says. "There was a lot of skullduggery over there. I don't know whether that story's true or not."

Alexander affirms that his grandfather was close friends with the novelist Stephen Crane, who then lived in Athens and modeled a character in his novel Active Servicea after Alexander. Dr. Alexander has a copy Crane gave to his grandfather.

Dr. Alexander regrets one thing about his grandfather's 1893-97 ambassadorship: "He didn't get the Bosnia situation straightened out." For Ebenezer Alexander, that might have taken another year or two.