Remembering Rafer Johnson
The 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medalist's exemplary life
Sports Biblio Reader 12.6.20
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Last American Glovemaker; Best Baseball Books of 2020; Negro Leagues Stats; The Demise of the Southwest Conference; How the NBA Became a Spectacle; Sportswriting’s Continuous Evolution; Dan Le Batard; Footballers of the Great War Art; The Revival of ‘Leonard’s Losers;’ Last Call for the Sports Bar
In the Olympic decathlon, an American-dominated event since Jim Thorpe won the first event in 1912, Rafer Johnson was the seventh man from the United States to earn the gold medal when he climbed to the top of the podium in 1960.
That included back-to-back golds by Bob Mathias before him; after him, there were Bill Toomey and Bruce Jenner, and Britain’s two-time winner Daley Thompson. The last two Olympic golds have gone to the now-retired American Ashley Eaton.
In a star-studded event whose champion is considered “The World’s Greatest Athlete,” Rafer Johnson, who died this week at the age of 86, stood out for the 60 remaining years of his life.
During a memorable Rome Olympics chronicled in book form by David Maraniss in 2009, Johnson’s feat was hard to ignore, even with the headlines garnered by Cassius Clay, Wilma Rudolph and Abebe Bikila.
His gold medal was an achievement that almost wasn’t allowed to happen, after he earned a role in the movie “Spartacus” that had been filming earlier in 1960. Due to the Amateur Athletic Union’s strict amateur rules, however, an athlete who wanted to remain eligible to compete couldn’t accept money for anything, even if it wasn’t sports-related.
Johnson gave up the part of an Ethiopian gladiator who duels Spartacus (played by his acquaintance Kirk Douglas), and prepared for Rome full-time.
Johnson’s decathlon battle with C.K. Yang, a fellow UCLA student, came after several years of injuries, including being unable to finish all the events in Melbourne in 1956. After nine events in Rome, Johnson held a slight lead going into the 1,500-meter run, considered Yang’s best event.
While Yang won the race, Johnson turned in a personal best of 4:49.7, earning enough points for the gold medal.
That was the end of a marvelous athletic career for Johnson, who played basketball for John Wooden at UCLA, lettered in football for the Bruins and was chosen by the Los Angeles Rams late in the 1959 NFL draft.
But an abundance of post-athletic roles, including others in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, would be forthcoming.
So would another momentous experience in the spotlight, this one borne out of tragedy: The 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Johnson, working on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, moved with the candidate’s party to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after the New York Senator gave a victory speech in the California primary.
Gunfire erupted, Kennedy was lying on the floor bleeding, and Johnson and NFL player Rosey Grier, also a campaign aide, played a role in apprehending the gunman, Sirhan Sirhan.
The normally easy-going Johnson was traumatized for months, and it wasn’t until Eunice Shriver, Kennedy’s sister, called him with an offer to help organize what became the Special Olympics.
He found a new purpose and passion, and stayed involved in Olympic-related competitions and activities in southern California, culminating with serving on a committee to bring the Games to Los Angeles in 1984.
On the day of the opening ceremonies, Johnson, then 49, ran up the stairs at the Los Angeles Coliseum to light the Olympic torch, later telling the Los Angeles Times:
“When I got up there, and I turned and saw the crowd, saw that view, and there was nothing behind me, and I’m standing on something about a foot wide, I know I would have fallen. I can’t even explain the feeling. My heart was pounding in my chest. I felt like I was going to die.”
More tributes here from the LA84 Foundation, and the Kingsburg Recorder in his Texas hometown.
For further reading: “The Best That I Can Be,” by Rafer Johnson, published by Waterbrook Press, 1999.
Firin’ Up the Hot Stove
Official baseball historian John Thorn recently gave a Zoom talk in his hometown of Catskill, N.Y. about the bizarre baseball season of 2020, getting into some of the rules changes and other experiments undertaken during a 60-game regular season and expanded playoff format. He noted that “baseball itself was once an innovation born of time and place and circumstance, a game plucked from sandlots and grassy pastures and altered for urban, adult recreation;”
Dan Schlossberg compiles his list of top baseball books for 2020 at Sports Collectors Digest, and even ranks ‘em in order;
One of Schlossberg’s picks, Brad Balukjian’s “Wax Pack Goods,” also was included in NPR’s top books of the year, sports and otherwise;
Mitchell Nathanson’s Jim Bouton biography also is making best-of lists in a number of places. At Reason Clayton Trutor writes that the pitcher presented in the author’s telling “evokes equal parts traditional and subversive;”
The baseball glove industry has gone almost completely offshore since the 1960s, but in Nokona, Texas, the last Made in America leather goods factory continues what it started in 1926;
Former Detroit Tigers farmhand Will Savage lays out what Major League Baseball stands to lose by shedding its small-town minor league clubs and affiliations, saying it will “be leaving people that powerful decision-makers tend to neglect — people who can’t afford to drive all day to spend hundreds of dollars at the nearest MLB ballpark;”
Baseball History Daily this week posted a 1912 news service story interviewing a lanky Southerner with the Cleveland Naps named Joe Jackson, who was asked to describe his sixth sense about playing in the outfield;
Right now I’m reading Jeremy Beer’s biography of Oscar Charleston, which will be part of a winter baseball issue in January. One of the interesting things the author does is use advanced stats to compare Charleston to white stars of the time, which doesn’t always work because of the comparative lack of Negro Leagues stats. But there are some researchers who are adding more figures to a database on Seamheads.com that now includes stats from the 1926 Negro National League season. That year, by the way, Charleston batted .295 while playing for three clubs in the Eastern Colored League, and as he started his managerial career.
A Few Good Reads
In my roundup of Diego Maradona retrospectives last week, I missed this from Russell Jackson at ABC in Australia, on how ‘El Pibe’ was a gift to a generation of sportswriters:
“Where Ali had Norman Mailer, David Remnick and Mark Kram, and DiMaggio had Gay Talese and Richard Ben Cramer, there is no standout contender staking literary claim to the Argentinian hero.
“One obvious explanation is that in both personality and playing style, Maradona was a figure too lurid and unbelievable for the restrained pens of respectable journalists and writers.”
More:
“Yet sportswriters certainly tried to destroy the myth, or possibly just proved Thomas McGuane's theory that the most memorable sports writing springs from avidity, not detachment; they were simply too invested in Maradona's brilliance to accept his horrifying descent into the lifestyle that blunted it.”
Sports Illustrated diasporan Steve Rushin returns to his former space to pen a cover story pouring a few for legendary sports bars that have closed due to COVID lockdowns. They include The Fours in Boston, Foley’s Pub in New York and Guthrie’s Tavern in Chicago. Sadly, there will be more, and a classic watering hole in my town that includes a good bit of sports bonhomie is on a lifeline: Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta has gotten a $120K injection of donations since making a public appeal, hoping to make it to a 65th year in business;
It’s been 25 years since the Southwest Conference ended and merged with the Big 8 to become the Big 12. As old SWC hands related recently in this ESPN oral history, hard feelings still endure about what was, even aside from the SMU scandal that set the league’s demise in motion;
A Southern college football novelty was “Leonard’s Losers,” a radio show that turned the projection schtick on its head to declare teams that wouldn’t be chalking up victories on any given Saturday. Leonard Postero died in 2001, and a Tennessee resident named George Yardley is reviving the format on the Leonard’s Losers old website, admitting it’s “still a work in progress;”
The current ugliness in college sports continues to revolve around college basketball coaches—not just connected to FBI investigations—but also those accused of physical, verbal and emotional abuse. Wichita State coach Gregg Marshall resigned right before the season began, picking up a $7.75 million buyout check on the way out. That follows a similar departure of Pat Chambers at Penn State, where players still aren’t getting answers to their questions about what happened;
Just read the newly published “From Hang Time to Prime Time,” Pete Croatto’s book on the business and entertainment impetus behind David Stern’s NBA, and will be devoting more to that shortly. LitHub recently published this excerpt, focused on Marvin Gaye’s rendition of the national anthem at the 1983 All-Star Game that the author argues is a seminal event in pushing the NBA into unprecedented cultural terrain;
From Axios, another step in the evolution of sportswriting, a thumbnail look at the changing nature of access to sports figures;
ESPN has laid off some more well-known writers as part of major staff reductions, including Ian O’Connor and Wayne Drehs, who was blindsided after a 20-year run. Also axed was the producer for the Dan Le Batard radio show, and this week he announced he would be on the move at the end of the year. That signifies an end to ESPN’s multi-platform talent strategy, Bryan Curtis argues at The Ringer, as Le Batard was one of many newspaper columnists hired away to write and be a talking head for the Worldwide Leader;
Another review of Robert Colls' “This Sporting Life,” his new and substantial sporting history of England, comes from History Today;
British artist Tim Godden is accepting orders for his “Footballers of the Great War” series illustrations in time for the Christmas holidays; he also has done a variety of baseball works, including some from the Negro Leagues.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 226, published Dec. 6, 2020.
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