Word: decathloners
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...track. In Johnson's junior year, Track Coach Murl Dodson drove him the 24 miles down to Tulare to watch Local Hero Bob Mathias compete in the event he had won as a 17-year-old in the 1948 Olympics in London and at Helsinki in 1952: the decathlon. "On the way back," says Johnson, "it struck me. I could have beaten most of the guys in that meet. That's when I decided to be a decathlon man." Only four weeks later, Johnson won California's Junior A.A.U. Decathlon Championship. In his senior year, Johnson...
Triumph & Defeat. At least two dozen colleges bid for Johnson. He chose U.C.L.A. "because there was something about the atmosphere I liked." To concentrate on the decathlon. Johnson passed up college football, much to the frustration of the late coach Red Sanders, who saw in Johnson a future brilliant tailback in U.C.L.A.'s single-wing formation. Freshman Johnson improved fast enough in the decathlon to win the 1955 Pan American Games in Mexico City, celebrated by scoring 7.985 points at a welcome-home meet in Kingsburg-thereby breaking Mathias' world record by 98 points...
...dozed off. He was completely relaxed when a car coming from the opposite direction swerved across the road and hit the Johnson car head on. The impact jackknifed Johnson. Only his fit condition and strong body saved his back from a serious injury that would have ended all decathlon competition then and there. As it was, he suffered a severe muscular strain around the lower spine that knocked him out of another duel with Kuznetsov at the U.S.-U.S.S.R. track meet in Philadelphia in July...
...Challenge. For the past six years Johnson's life has been dominated by the decathlon. In recent months he lived for little else. Now a U.C.L.A. graduate student in physical education, Rafer Johnson shares an $83-a-month apartment with his brother Jim, a U.C.L.A. football player and a hurdler of near-Olympic caliber. Johnson has had no time for dates or vacations, and little relaxation beyond strumming a guitar. Every afternoon he got into his 1949 Chevrolet, a vehicle plainly showing its 150,000-mile past, and drove out to the U.C.L.A. field to practice...
There, day after day, Johnson and Yang held their own private meet. Formosa's formidable Yang had been a promising baseball pitcher at home in 1954 when track coaches noticed his running speed and agility, talked him into trying the decathlon. To his astonishment, Yang won the Asian Games that year. In 1958 Yang came to the U.S. for a couple of months to pick up pointers, liked it so well that he learned to speak English and settled down as a physical education student at U.C.L.A. to work with Johnson. At 6 ft. 1 in., 180 lbs., Yang...