Word: decathloners
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Some 40 champions from a bevy of sports were in the crowd of 400 that stood cheering in Los Angeles last week as genial, handsome U.S. Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson, 23. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S Sportsman of the Year for 1958, got to his feet to accept his award. In shy dignity, Johnson, California Negro who last July in Moscow scored an astounding 8,302 points to win a tense, ten-event duel with Russia's Vasiliy Kuznetsov, thanked his parents for "making it all possible," added quietly: "I have but one goal in life: to live like...
...just whipped Soviet Decathlon Hero Vasily Kuznetsov, but the husky U.S. Negro got a brotherly buss from the loser and a tremendous roar of approval from the 30,000 fans, as he mounted the winner's platform in Moscow's Lenin Stadium and smilingly held a bouquet of flowers aloft in triumph. Rafer Lewis Johnson, 22, of Kingsburg, Calif, had treated appreciative Muscovites to one of the greatest individual performances in track and field history. He had amassed a world-record 8,302 points in the rugged decathlon*—:considered by many the toughest test of human endurance...
...town's inhabitants were very surprised. To the home-town folks, Johnson is a Samson, Paul Bunyan and Frank Merriwell rolled into one. His smoothly muscled build (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.) casts him in the mold of Jim Thorpe and Bob Mathias, great Olympic decathlon champions of the past. In high school he captained the track, basketball and football teams, is still remembered as a good infielder on the baseball sandlots and a powerful hitter...
Good As Any. But Rafe did not take the decathlon seriously until 1952, when he went to nearby Tulare, Calif, to see Mathias win the Olympic decathlon trials, decided he was as good as or better than most of the contestants...
Born. To Robert Bruce Mathias, 26, two-time Olympic decathlon winner ('48, '52), all-round athlete turned Hollywood actor, and Melba Wiser Mathias, 26, his former classmate: a second daughter, second child; in Los Angeles. Name: Megan Louise. Weight...