A few weeks before I flew to Paris in 2018 for my first Gay Games, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I went anyway, numb, treating the trip like one last hoorah in case it turned out to be one. I’d never played a round of golf with people from all over the world who were just like me — no hiding, no coded language, none of the quiet editing I usually did without even noticing I was doing it.
At the Opening Ceremony, I heard the name Tom Waddell — the Games’ founder and a New Jersey native — for the first time, attached to an award given each year to someone who embodies the Games’ three pillars: Participation, Inclusion, Personal Best. I didn’t know yet who he was. I just knew that feeling already had his name on it, before mine.
Here is who he was.
Tom Waddell was born Thomas Flubacher in Paterson on Nov. 1, 1937. His parents separated while he was young, and at 15 he went to live with a Wyckoff couple, Gene and Hazel Waddell, former vaudeville acrobats who eventually adopted him and gave him their name.
Wadell ran track at Ramsey High School. At Springfield College, he competed in football and gymnastics before turning to the decathlon, and after the sudden death of a close friend, he shifted his studies toward medicine at the New Jersey College of Medicine. In 1965, he interrupted that path to travel to Selma, Alabama, and join the movement for Black voting rights.
A year later, the Army drafted him, slated him for Vietnam, and then — in one of the stranger turns in his story — assigned him instead to train for the 1968 Olympics. He finished sixth in the decathlon in Mexico City, among the world’s best all-around athletes.
He built a medical career afterward, practicing in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood and later working internationally. But it was a gay bowling league that gave him the idea that would define his legacy: an international sporting event built not around who could win, but around who could belong.
He and his colleagues announced it as the Gay Olympic Games — until, weeks before the first event in 1982, the U.S. Olympic Committee sued over the word “Olympic.” Waddell and his colleagues lost the name but held the Games anyway, days later from Aug. 28 to Sept. 5, under a new one. Roughly 1,300 athletes from a dozen countries came to San Francisco behind a torch relay that began at The Stonewall Inn.
In 1985, Waddell was diagnosed with AIDS. He competed anyway at the second Gay Games in 1986 and won a gold medal in the javelin — not after beating his diagnosis, but in the middle of it, outcome still unknown, the same way most people actually live with a diagnosis like that. He died on July 11, 1987, at 49.
I understand that particular kind of competing better than I wish I did. A few weeks after Paris, surgeons removed my prostate. Most of the cancer came with it, but my PSA tests still show cancer cells present, so my doctors are monitoring me. I’m writing this from the middle of it, not the other side — the way Waddell was still in the middle of his own fight when he threw that javelin in 1986.
I started Garden State Rainbow Sports because I wanted other people in my home state to feel what I’d felt on that course in Paris, before I even knew whose idea I was living out. I was 23 when Waddell died in 1987; his name meant nothing to me yet. It would be another 31 years before I heard it, at the exact moment I needed it. You never really know, when you build something, who it’s going to catch, or when. He just built it as honestly as he could, and it was still standing when I needed it.
He was born in Paterson. He was raised in Wyckoff. New Jersey shaped him before the world ever learned his name.
Tom Waddell: doctor, Olympic athlete, founder of the Gay Games, son of New Jersey. Let’s honor him.
