IT’S ONLY FITTING that the new Moses documentary was produced with help from the “voice of God.”
Of course, that’s Edwin Moses and actor Morgan Freeman. They met in 2005 at the Laureus World Sports Awards in Portugal, where Freeman, who has played the Almighty on screen, asked why there was no film about Moses. Hadn’t he revolutionized the 400 hurdles?
Moses was already pondering a documentary on his life, but needed to find the right people to execute his vision. With the same preparation he brought to track & field, he finally found them.
Moses — 13 Steps celebrated its world premiere at Atlanta’s Morehouse College in late September.
While the film crew is German, Freeman and his partner Lori McCreary are executive producers on the 105-minute documentary from Broadview Pictures.
Producer Leopold Hoesch — whom Moses approached after seeing his film about Dallas Mavericks player Dirk Nowitzki — was well aware of Moses’ storied career. He had even watched him compete at meets in Europe.
“We used to go because we wanted to see him lose,” said Hoesch, who perhaps was rooting for 400H rival Harald Schmid at the time. “We never did. He was like royalty.”
That reverence for Moses and his career — on and off the track — is evident in the film, which a publicist said is still in talks regarding distribution.
The premiere was part of the Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival and the crowd at Moses’ alma mater, where the track is named after him, applauded every time he crossed the finish line in 1st place.
“Running 400 meters with 10 hurdles is no joke,” Moses, now 69, says in his opening lines. “It is a catastrophe waiting to happen.”
But not for him. At least not during one of the greatest streaks in the history of sport.
Propelled by his innovative 13-step pattern, Moses won 122 races [107 consecutive finals] over a span of 9 years, 9 months and 9 days. He won two Olympic gold medals and a bronze and held the World Record from 1976 until 1992.
The documentary, which had award-winning sneak peeks in Los Angeles and Paris last summer, shows how Moses combined athleticism with activism. He fought to bring higher appearance fees to the sport while also helping lead the anti-doping crusade.
Familiar faces describe Moses’ impact. They range from gold medalists Tommie Smith, Daley Thompson, Michael Johnson, Roger Kingdom and Karsten Warholm to Hollywood veterans — and fellow Morehouse Men — Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee. Even astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson weighs in.
Thanks to home movies from the time he was 7 years old, Moses’ family life takes center stage. He said he hopes to show today’s youth what it was like to grow up in a two-parent home within a stable Black community. Moses’ mother and father were college athletes who became educators in Dayton, Ohio. His mother Gladys described her son as “full of curiosity” and very organized and focused.
Even though Moses would jump over hedges in his yard, no one could have predicted his athletic success.
“Ed was a pipsqueak,” said his brother, Irving. “He was always second team, third team. We called him a scrub.”
However, Irving added, he “had a metamorphosis when he went to college.”
“I looked like Urkel when I came,” Moses said of his arrival at Morehouse, which he attended on an academic scholarship. The college had no track, no stadium and a program that was on the chopping block.
Four months after his first 400 hurdles race, Moses was Olympic champion. With the mind of a physicist — and no longer physically a pipsqueak — he broke down the dynamics of hurdling. Moses knew he had to stay on the inside of his lane around the turn to run the shortest distance. That meant leading with his left leg every time — 13 steps.
“Thirteen steps is difficult, to keep the stride pattern going in fatigue” said Bob Kersee, who now coaches Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. “He literally changed the sport in a year. It was a beautiful thing to see.”
Track & field fans will enjoy archival footage from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. There are even races Moses had never seen since they were from the pre-YouTube era. “Man, I didn’t know I was kicking ass like that,” Moses said. “I saw that footage, I had tears in my eyes.”
The documentary also shows how Moses helped drive social change. He watched television coverage of Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and was inspired to see “Black men standing up for the rights of everyone, human rights.”
Warholm said that Moses was “shaped by his history.”
“He grew up in a different time,” Warholm said, “the way he had to find solutions for himself, gave him the mind and the attitude of a champion.”
When Moses arrived at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, he had never competed on such a large stage.
“I kept myself from freaking out, had a specific plan to not get excited over anything,” he said.
Moses also kept to himself. “I wasn’t unfriendly, but I didn’t have time to play around with people I didn’t know.”
That included eventual silver medalist Mike Shine.
“He didn’t want everybody else to have his secret about how he did what he did. So he was very secretive about his warmup,” Shine said. “It was very intimidating and I think he knew that.”
Moses shattered ’72 Olympic champ John Akii-Bua’s World Record to win his first gold medal.
After graduating from Morehouse, Moses took a job as an engineer with General Dynamics in Los Angeles, where he worked on nuclear submarines. While living there, he met Smith, who was still being harassed about Mexico City and was under FBI surveillance. Smith became a mentor to Moses, who realized that being an Olympic gold medalist could help him effect change.
“When you’re an African American athlete, you are carrying that double burden of athletic excellence but also the meaning that you bring to the African American community,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
On the track circuit, Moses was on the first IOC Athletes Commission and helped pave the way for athletes to be paid as professionals. “I was a radical from the very beginning,” he said. “If we didn’t get what we thought we deserved, we just didn’t run.”
He also played a part in developing anti-doping policies across all sports. Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency said that “to have Edwin Moses in the trenches with you” was an advantage in cases such as the one against Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong.
But while the documentary depicts Moses’ triumphs, it doesn’t shy away from a dark chapter in his career. He was arrested in Los Angeles in early 1985 for soliciting a prostitute.
Moses said he was approached by an undercover police officer while his car was stopped at a red light and he drove off laughing. “I knew that it was a trap from the beginning,” he said. “I fought it because I wasn’t guilty.”
A jury agreed.
In 1987, Moses’ remarkable streak came to an end in Madrid. Although he had food poisoning, Moses said meet organizers begged him not to pull out of the race.
Moses clipped the 10th hurdle with his heel, knocking it over, and Danny Harris defeated him.
“I legitimately shouldn’t have run,” Moses said. “The Spanish people needed to see me run. I sucked it up.”
But Moses said he never lost to the same person twice.
As Jackson, who knows a few things about superheroes, said, “He was like Superman in real life.”