A MAN IN MOTION : Mathias Continues to Peck Away at New Challenges as If He Were Still a Decathlete

Rafer Johnson likes to call fellow Olympic decathlon medalist Bob Mathias the grand old man of track and the grandfather of the decathlon.

But don’t be misled by a little kidding among Olympic heroes.

At 6-feet 4-inches, 225 pounds, Bob Mathias still looks fit enough to undertake another decathlon.

Winner of two Olympic gold medals, Mathias, 54, says he does occasionally throws the discus for old times’ sake.

But Mathias, who moved to Orange County last month as executive director of the National Fitness Foundation, groans at the thought of putting himself through the 10 events of the decathlon today.

“If they only knew,� he says with a smile.

Somehow you suspect he is just being humble, which is the way he always has been.

Despite his modesty and the fact that it may have been decades since he last tried to leap over a 16-foot high bar with the help of a bamboo pole, you probably would not want to challenge him on the tennis court, where he spends much of his recreational time nowadays.

His hair has turned ashen, but he still looks big enough, and strong enough, to be a professional football player. And he still has what he describes with typical understatement as a knack for different sports.

In high school, he averaged 18 points a game in basketball; in college, his 96-yard return of a Frank Gifford punt carried the Stanford football team to the 1952 Rose Bowl in lieu of USC.

At age 17, his first victory in the 1948 Olympic decathlon earned him the title of the greatest athlete in the world.

Asked if there were any sports in which he had ever met with failure, he had to go all the way down the list before coming up with surfing and jai alai.

He once joked that his next Olympic event might well be the luge, because all it seemed to require is a strong push-off and plenty of weight.

But he really doesn’t need any more Olympic events to prove his merit. His victories in the 1948 London Olympics and 1952 Helsinki Olympics were enough to put him on the covers of Time and Life magazines, just a few of the honors showered upon him for his performances.

He received the Sullivan Award as the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1952, and was named one of the nation’s 10 most outstanding young men by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. .

President Eisenhower named Mathias his good will ambassador, and sent him on trips around the world to help the progress of athletics in other nations.

Meanwhile, enthusiastic Americans were busy naming practically everything else after him.

In his hometown of Tulare, Calif., the fanciest stadium in the area became Bob Mathias Stadium. A wing of the Tulare Public Library was more recently designated the Bob Mathias Room, where 543 items of his memorabilia are on display, including the two gold medals.

An American-owned race track in Tijuana named two horse races after him, and his track coach, Virgil Jackson, even named a son after him.

“That was a tribute to Bob from my father,� said Glen Mathias Jackson, a Manhattan Beach architect who was 3 years old when his namesake won the second gold medal. “He cared a lot for Bob and that was his way of showing his affection.�

The event that originally brought Mathias fame has become a sort of metaphor for his life, a connect-the-dots pattern of professional versatility, if not constancy. He has had almost as many careers as there are events in the decathlon, although the title “Olympic hero� is one he never will shed.

After becoming the two-time gold medalist and State Department good will ambassador, he was a Marine captain, movie and television actor, longtime owner of a Sierra camp for children, four-term congressman from the Tulare area, deputy director of the Selective Service, executive director of the U.S. Olympic Training Center, and now executive director of the National Fitness Foundation.

A certain amount of folklore has grown up around Mathias’ athletic history, and he confirms the truth of much of it.

The world’s greatest athlete did develop from a skinny, tired 11-year-old with nosebleeds who was for a time restricted to bed for 12 hours a day by his physician father, who diagnosed anemia and prescribed a regimen of pills and shots.

Mathias had recovered by the time he entered high school at 13. But he did not have the kind of build that drew second looks from coaches even in Tulare, where most any student who showed signs of life played a sport--or better yet, sports.

Although Mathias was tall, he was so spindly that the only activity at which he appeared capable of excelling was playing clarinet in the band.

That skinny-as-a-pole phase did not last long, however. He suddenly grew six inches and gained 40 pounds in a year, provoking his father to later comment that he must have hit on the right medicine.

After earning considerable high school glory in three sports, and providing the track and field team with exceptional performances in four events, the high and low hurdles, and the shot put and discus, Mathias agreed to attempt a decathlon after graduation.

He had never pole-vaulted or handled a javelin, which was considered too dangerous a pursuit for high school. His coach, Virgil Jackson, borrowed one from Fresno State’s team to familiarize Mathias with throwing it.

They had an idea that if he trained hard, he might have a good chance in the 1952 Olympics, four years away.

Instead, he immediately won the first two decathlons he entered in the summer of ‘48, and, as the youngest track athlete ever to represent the United States, took the gold medal at London as well.

He had learned how to pole vault and use the javelin only three months earlier.

Two remarks made by Mathias at the end of the 1948 Games have become part of Olympic lore. Upon finishing the 1,500 meter race, he told his mother he would never do a decathlon again.

And when someone asked him how he planned to celebrate his victory, he replied, “I’ll start shaving, I guess.�

The Olympic Games had been suspended since 1936 due to World War II, and because there had been no Olympics since he was 5 years old, Mathias says he didn’t really realize the importance of his accomplishment the first time around.

“I lucked through it,� he said. “So many things could have happened. I was just lucky to get through some of the events, I was so inexperienced.

“If I had known what the Olympics were and how big it was, I could have gotten nervous and tied up. But to me it was just a track meet in London with a lot of foreigners in it.

“Somehow I had the knack or else he (Jackson) was a good coach. I sure didn’t train that much. I didn’t have time. My marks are not that super compared to today’s marks. But at the time, they were better than everyone else’s.

“The medal I liked best was the second one, in 1952. The first time, I was so young and I’d only trained for the decathlon for three months. I just didn’t know anything about the Olympics, or what they meant. I was too young to realize what I was getting into.�

His second medal served the dual purpose of proving the first was no fluke and of breaking American Glenn Morris’ Olympic decathlon record, set in 1936. He won by the largest margin in Olympic history.

Rafer Johnson, the American Olympic gold medalist in 1956, became interested in the decathlon after traveling 25 miles down a San Joaquin Valley road from his hometown of Kingsburg, Calif., with his high school coach to see Mathias defend his national title in a meet at Tulare in 1952.

“He’s seen the world, but he’s real down-to-earth,� Johnson said of Mathias. “I like him very much.

“Anytime you’re raised like he was and I was, where everyone in town knew everyone and dealt with them on a friendly basis, when you come from that background, you tend to be a little more easy-going and relaxed. It’s not hick, I’m not saying that, it’s just a nice kind of warm feeling.

“Bob just did the best he could do, which at that time was the best in the world. He probably thinks if somebody else was given the same opportunities he had, they would have done the same.

“That might or might not be true. I don’t know how many people would have been as brilliant as he was.�

Another American gold medalist decathlete, Bill Toomey, remembers his first impressions of Mathias, whom he was introduced to upon winning his first national title in 1965.

“I met him and I was floored at what a super human being he was,� Toomey said. “He has those (genuine) qualities in spite of his fame. It’s never detracted from who he is.�

“I think Bob is probably one of the best representatives the Olympics ever had from this country. He always has time for people and he puts things back where he has received benefit, like in fitness.

“It’s hard to believe he’s real. I don’t see any Olympians being able to fill his shoes, being the type of person he is, and the drama and sensation he created. And he has lived up to it.�

For a generation of Americans who grew up keeping Bob Mathias scrapbooks, and viewing the man with a combination of admiration, envy and awe, his life might appear as flawless as that of a storybook character.

This myth he debunks immediately. Bob Mathias is not a man comfortable with being placed on a pedestal. He’d just as soon climb down and stand next to everyone else.

“My life hasn’t been all wins, that’s just the part people read about,� Mathias said. “A lot of work and disappointments go along with that.�

He remembers the frustration of not winning individual track events at Stanford, despite supposedly being the best all-around athlete in the world. But college track had no event to measure Mathias’ versatility.

“Having beaten everyone in the world in the decathlon, people would expect me to come in first (in individual events), but I wouldn’t because I wasn’t a specialist,� he said, “That was frustrating. My life was not all that perfect.

“Everything I went out for, I didn’t win, and the further I went into (collegiate track), the better the specialists became. I never really won everything all the time.�

His two years of Stanford football wasn’t all roses either.

“The first year, 1951, was great, but I sprained my ankle the week before the Rose Bowl,� he recalled. “I was really looking forward to having a great game, but my ankle was that big (he spread his hands to indicate a space about the size of a small pumpkin) and they shot it full of Novocain and I was groggy. The whole game was a disaster for Stanford (which lost to Illinois, 40-7).

“The next year we didn’t have a very good team. It was a very frustrating season because we didn’t win and we just couldn’t do anything.�

His mind fast-forwarded to a professional setback, circa 1974, when, after completing four terms in Congress, he lost an election. He was a self-described fiscal conservative.

“The hardest thing about being a politician was learning to say no,� he said. “The easiest thing is to say yes, but a good politician has to say no once in a while.

“Probably the toughest part for me was getting used to going from sports, where everyone likes you and you don’t make an enemy, to politics, where if 51% of the people like you, you can stay in office. In that world, people stomp on you and say bad things about you . . .�

He has no desire to revive his political career, but he does have one regret about his athletic career, and it is particularly relevant in light of the fact that Daly Thompson of Britain last summer equaled Mathias’ record as double gold medalist in the decathlon.

“I think I should have tried for a third medal,� he said. “I really retired when I was 21 years old.

“Four years later, I was only 25, and then you’re really just starting the prime of your athletic career.�

By contrast to Mathias’ premature retirement, Toomey was 29 when he won a gold medal in 1968.

“I would have liked to have tried, or been able to keep in it longer, but I had to go in the Marine Corps for 2 1/2 years,� Mathias said. “It was the Korean War, and everybody had to.

“At the time, it didn’t seem that bad. But looking back, I wish I had had time to train for the Olympics or maybe to try some pro sport.�

A college fullback, he was drafted by the Washington Redskins, but never signed.

Said Toomey: “I would suspect he could have been a pro football player. I think he probably never even achieved all he could have.�

When Mathias moved to Orange County in June, Laguna Niguel became the only city in the nation with two Olympic champion decathletes in residence. The other is Toomey, who won his medal 20 years after Mathias’ first.

Mathias’ current project is to help with the fundraising for the U.S. Fitness Academy, and supervise the eventual construction of the $35 million facility planned for Aliso Viejo.

The three-year-old National Fitness Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the fitness of Americans. George Allen, former Los Angeles Rams and Washington Redskins coach, is the chairman.

The Aliso Viejo complex, which is scheduled to be completed in November 1988, will be designed to include housing, dining, and parking, Mathias said, as well as gyms, jogging trails, and a computerized fitness resource library.

Its creators envision providing classes and various fitness and health accreditations to members of such community groups as the Parks and Recreation Dept., the YMCA, and the Red Cross, as well as schools and corporations.

The potential clientele would be larger than that of the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., which Mathias helped to establish.

“A lot of us have seen the sports centers in Europe and Japan, and this will be modeled after that with a small, campus-like atmosphere. It works out good in Europe, so we thought we should have one.�

Personally, Mathias is happy to return to California. He spent the last year in Indianapolis where the fitness center was originally planned to be constructed. It was moved to Orange County because available space and a more comfortable year-round climate.

Mathias and his wife, Gwen, have moved into a home in the Kite Hill area of Laguna Niguel, and are in the process of getting their belongings squared away and the house redecorated. Gwen is a professional interior decorator.

Their study is already arranged, with almost every inch of wall space from floor to ceiling covered with framed photos of the Mathias’, their four daughters, friends and golf partners such as Gerald Ford.

There also are mementos of his five movies, such as the sword he used in “The Minotaur� and a poster to promote “It Happened In Athens,� with co-star Jayne Mansfield.

The back yard pool gives him the chance to mix swimming with his tennis and walking schedule. But it reduces the scale of his potential gardening and fix-it projects, which are just two more of his favorite occupations.