“A wonderful triumph of Polish fists!” announced “Przegląd Sportowy”. And coach Feliks Stamm, in a radio conversation with editor Bohdan Tomaszewski, said very modestly: “Basically, I'm satisfied.”
On October 23, 1964, the penultimate day of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, we had four Polish boxers in the finals. Artur Olech lost the gold medal fight in the flyweight (51 kg) with the Italian Atzori, but soon the Japanese played the “Mazurek Dąbrowski” three times in a row. In the light weight (60 kg), Józef Grudzień defeated Wilikton Barannikov, in the light welterweight (63.5 kg) Jerzy Kulej won against Evgeniy Frołow, and in the welterweight category (67 kg) Marian Kasprzyk won against Ricardas Tamulis.
Three golds in an hour, 3-0 for the Poles in the final battles with rivals from the Soviet Union – it couldn't have been better, in those politically difficult times, the nationality of the defeated opponents further enhanced the achievements of Papa Stamm's team.
Let us add that, apart from three gold medals and a silver medal from the last day of boxing at the Tokyo Olympics, our boxers had previously won three bronze medals there – Józef Grzesiak in the light middleweight (71 kg), Tadeusz Walasek in the middleweight (75 kg) and Zbigniew Pietrzykowski in the light heavyweight (81kg). In total, out of 10 categories we had Olympic medals in seven!
“He abused them with inhuman effort.” But that wasn't why he made them champions
How is it done? How did the legendary Stamm do it? “Stamm's phenomenon was his love for what he did. For modesty. Stamm lived in a suitcase. We once persuaded him to buy a car. “Mr. Feliks, it's so stupid that we have them and you walk on foot,” we said many times. And he replied: “Why do I need a car? If I need it, I have you. One of you will help me.” Or his reaction to Kasprzyk's injury in the final in Tokyo. He heard that Marian had broken his finger because it made a loud noise. He knew he would come and complain. “Mr. Feliks, I broke my arm,” Kasprzyk said during the break. “Which one,” Stamm asked. “The right one,” says Kasprzyk. “Then box with your left,” Papa said. “Good” – Kasprzyk went and won the gold medal – said Jerzy Kulej years ago in an interview with “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
It is possible that the anecdote about Kasprzyk's broken thumb was slightly embellished by the two-time Olympic champion. Kasprzyk himself says that Stamm behaved a little differently – namely, he approached him psychologically, asking if he should surrender him. Then Kasprzyk realized that this was absolutely out of the question, he came back to the fight excited and won it. Whatever the case, it is clear that Stamm knew how to get the best out of his players. Certainly because he believed in them very much. Not only in the ring.
Let's give Kulej a voice once again. “Before the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Marian Kasprzyk was wrongly sentenced to a year in prison, accused by a policeman who was himself a bandit. After seven months, Kasprzyk was released for good behavior. He managed to go to Tokyo,” the master recalled in the conversation already quoted. Here, Kulej did not give Stamm all the credit. It should be emphasized that it was thanks to his efforts that Kasprzyk's lifetime disqualification for beating up a policeman was annulled. And that Papa bet on Kasprzyk, even though he had at his disposal the great Leszek Drogosz, the then current Olympic bronze medalist from Rome in 1960.
“I worked with Stamm for 15 years with only one conflict at the beginning. To build such authority that for 15 years such a recalcitrant student was able to obey, bend his neck and allow himself to be abused with inhumane efforts during training was a great art,” Kulej said towards the end of his life. – “There was no equipment, no biological regeneration, no nutritional supplements. , and yet we worked like oxen. And it was Papa Stamm who managed to convince us to do so,” he added.
Gold or prison
Stamm did not have a university education, but he spoke English, German and Russian, was very curious about the work of coaches from various disciplines, was constantly learning, improving and developing. And he still wanted more.
When his team won two bronze medals at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, he considered it a failure and left the team. It was the result of disappointed hopes. Huge ones. In 1948, Aleksy Antkiewicz won bronze at the London Olympics and it was coach Stamm's first such medal. Four years later in Helsinki, Antkiewicz won silver, and Zygmunt Chychła became the Olympic champion – the first in the history of our boxing. Melbourne was planned by Papa Stamm as a major medal gathering. In 1953, at the end of the European Championships, Mr. Feliks was carried like a national hero by the crowd fans on hands from the Warsaw Gwardia hall to the hotel. Poland was grateful to him for as many as nine medals (out of 10 competitors!), including five gold. Especially for the spectacular victory over the Soviet Union, whose fighters won only two titles in Warsaw. After something like this, it's easier to understand that two bronze medals at the Melbourne Olympics could have been a disappointment, right?
But after the defeat, as the media claimed at the time, Stamm quickly decided to rehabilitate himself. After a few months, he returned to work with the team and convinced the next generation of boxers even better than the previous one that the most important thing in boxing is the head, because first you have to think, then the legs are important, because you have to be able to approach the opponent, and only at the end do the hands count, who throw punches. In the 1960s, Stamm encountered the most intelligent and most characterful students. He impressed them with his strength of calm and composure in every situation, no matter what. Let the evidence be an anecdote, how once the plane with the national team on board got into huge turbulence, and when the pilot managed to get the machine out of the turbulence and everyone calmed down a bit, one of the boxers asked: “Mr. Fel, weren't you scared?” Stamm allegedly said with a twinkle in his eye: “What, is that my plane?”
He asked for the anthem and took a telegram from his wife
Stamm told his boxers to always be confident and not to reveal to their opponents that they were in pain or tired. And at the same time he was able to open up to them. In the documentary “Papa Stamm” by Krzysztof Rogulski (film from 1978), Kulej gives beautiful testimony of this. The champion returns to the 1968 games in Mexico and tells how the coach spoke to him. “Jurek, you are the last one. If you don't, we won't hear the anthem at this Olympics. It's the end of the Olympics, last chance. Remember,” the coach allegedly told him, for whom two silvers and two bronzes at his next Olympics were not enough.
“It was so incredibly strong and so eloquent… Well, not many words, but the way he said it… I felt that if two opponents had put an obstacle in front of me at that time, I would have jumped at it to overcome it, to overcome it. to hear this anthem and to give this old man the pleasure of listening to this anthem,” Kulej confesses in Rogulski's film.
It is necessary to add that Kulej owed this gold to Stamm! Shortly before the Olympic Games in Mexico, in an out-of-the-ring fight, the boxer knocked out four policemen, and since he was a policeman himself (he had a fictitious job as a player of the Gwardia Warszawa militia club), the scandal became even bigger. Instead of going to the Olympics, Kulej was supposed to go to jail. Stamm reportedly promised that the Olympic champion from Tokyo would win again in Rome. Apparently, if Kulej had not won another gold, he could have gone to prison after returning to Poland.
Feliks Stamm even before Kazimierz Górski
Kuleja's second Olympic gold was the sixth and last such title in Stamm's coaching career. 1948 Olympic Games: bronze, 1952 Olympic Games: gold and silver, 1956: two bronzes, 1960: gold, three silvers and three bronzes, 1964: three golds, a silver and three bronzes, 1968: gold, two silvers and two bronzes. In total, there are as many as 24 Olympic medals. No wonder that with such achievements, Feliks Stamm is considered one of the best Polish coaches in history sports. Or maybe we should even write and talk about him as the only one, the best, and not “one of”?
In 1974 – 10 years after the golden hour in Tokyo – on the 30th anniversary of the Polish People's Republic, Stamm clearly won the plebiscite for the best coach. He did not give a chance to Kazimierz Górski, who won the Olympic gold with his players and took third place at the World Cup, nor to Jan Mulak, who built the legendary athletics Wunderteam, nor to the creators of the powers of our country. cycling (Henryk Łasak) and weightlifting (Klemens Roguski).
Let Stamm's genius be summed up by one more anecdote. Józef Grudzień received a telegram from his wife during the Tokyo Games. It was a congratulations for having already secured a medal (he did so by entering the semi-finals: then, as today, in boxing, bronze medals were awarded to both losing semi-finalists). Papa intercepted these congratulations and showed them to his fighter only after the final fight. He explained that he couldn't make him feel satisfied with the bronze he had in his hand. Because the goal has always been the maximum.
He individualized training 100 years ago!
Today, Stamm has his own memorial, there are monuments in the country and he lives in our memory. We received beautiful, very moving proof at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Stamm died in 1976, and Tomasz Dylak was born only a few years later, in the 1980s. Julia Szeremeta's coach did not have the opportunity to meet the legend, but before every important fight he looks into his phone, where he has photos of his loved ones – his wife, children, his recently deceased father – and Papa Stamm, to remind himself who he works for and who he wants to dedicate all this to.
While telling us this and showing us these photos, Dylak cried, happy that Szeremeta had just secured a medal. The first one for Polish boxing at the Olympics in 32 years. Dylak dreams of renovating the Polish boxing school. He, like Feliks Stamm, also wants to focus on individuality, on developing and highlighting what is best in given players. Stamm very quickly understood that in boxing you should not force people into any system, but that the best results will come when everyone boxes depending on their predispositions and temperament. Papa Stamm has already lectured the basics of such a modern coaching approach in the community – attention! – a hundred years ago. He was a visionary. No wonder that Polish sport owes so much to him.
The master couldn't afford a jacket for the child
Finally, let's go back to the golden hour in Tokyo, exactly 60 years ago. You can keep it longer on these recordings, you can simply watch December's golden performances here:
Kuleja:
Kasprzyka:
For these great fights, each of the heroes received $30 from Polish activists. How small these prizes were is proven by the fact that December, if he wanted to buy a winter jacket for his one-and-a-half-year-old son, would have to spend $46 in one of the Tokyo galleries. The store manager lowered the price in recognition of the Olympic champion.
And Papa Stamm? He in “Przegląd Sportowy” he explained in the most beautiful way what his prize was. “I have listened to Dąbrowski's Mazurka many times, in the rings of various countries. Here in the Korakuen hall, our anthem was played three times, and since it was in honor of the Olympic winners, this moment touched me particularly,” he explained.