Vol. 2 No. 80 Milt Campbell, All But Forgotten

I mentioned in an earlier blog that Milt Campbell was shown on the Olympic Trials broadcast for about two seconds in June.  Milt was the Decathlon Gold Medalist in 1956 in Melbourne, defeated two of the world's best in Rafer Johnson and Vasily Kuznetzov.  After Melbourne, Milt went on to play in the NFL for the Cleveland Browns.  His comments in this article by Dave D'Alessandro of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey are a great tribute to Milt's achievements.  ed.

               Rafer Johnson, Milt Campbell, Vasily Kuznetsov at Melbourne

Milt Campbell still a champion 55 years after he made history at the Olympics

Published: Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 4:30 AM     Updated: Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 5:01 PM

By   Dave D'Alessandro/Star-Ledger Columnist
To this day, one of the most vivid memories of the greatest adventure of his life involves hanging up on his mother, then snarling at the phone.
Milt Campbell — age 22, Seaman Apprentice and a world-class athlete to boot — was in San Diego, about to catch the plane to Melbourne. It was 1956, but mothers were pretty much like they are today, only more so: “Now don’t over-exert yourself,” Edith Campbell said from Plainfield. “Remember, you had a heart murmur, so don’t ...”
“Ma,” he shouted into the phone, “let me warn you now that if I don’t win this thing, I’m coming back in a box.”
Slam.
Nothing personal — he adored his mother. But this was just Campbell’s way: Positive thinking wasn’t so much a winning strategy as it was a religion, and to this day it sets him a breed apart from anyone you’ll ever meet — athlete or non-athlete. He could will himself to do anything, and this is one reason we still celebrate his life and his magnum opus, which took place 55 years ago today.
It was on Nov. 30, 1956, that the man we call the greatest athlete in New Jersey history earned that distinction, and it wouldn’t surprise us in the least if it took another 55 years before it is removed from the first line of Milt Campbell’s biography.
It was the day Campbell, who grew up in Plainfield, completed his two-day rout of the world’s greatest athletes by winning the gold medal in the decathlon at the Melbourne Olympics, and if this is the first time you’ve ever read about this, you are forgiven.
Because in many respects, the ’56 Olympics remain the games time forgot.
“It was in November, during the Australian summer, on the other side of the world, and there was hardly any media coverage at all,” recalls Elliott Denman, a U.S. Olympic walker who would become the longtime columnist for the Asbury Park Press. “So everything about those Games seemed like an afterthought, and people just didn’t relate to it. For that reason, Milt never achieved the national stardom that he deserved.”
Australia had just begun television broadcasting two months earlier. So the best footage is from the late documentarian, the legendary Bud Greenspan, who told The Star-Ledger in 2000 that “Campbell was, to me, the greatest athlete who ever lived.”
He was, at least, ahead of his time. Campbell treated athletic competition like Jackie Robinson treated baseball. It wasn’t only about possessing multiple tools, it was about crashing through the artifice to flaunt the art. There was little pretense: Yes, he brought a full arsenal to the competition, and would dare you to match it; but he also had an attitude uncommon among his contemporaries, connecting the mythic power of a champion’s vision and an incendiary passion to beat whoever strode beside him.
Today, as he recovers from the effects of cancer and diabetes at age 78 at his home in Gainesville, Ga., Campbell says he “wasn’t nasty-arrogant — it’s just that I’d have told you I was going to win if you asked me.
“I didn’t come for second or third. I honestly thought I put in more time than anyone in the world. If my head wasn’t right, how am I going to deal with the physical part of it?”
To some extent, the ’56 gold was actually won in 1952, he tells you. His stellar international debut was at the Helsinki Games, where as an 18-year-old high school senior he finished second to Bob Mathias, even though the first decathlon he had ever attempted was at the Olympic Trials just weeks earlier.
So by the time Melbourne came around, he was not only ready, he made sure everyone else knew it. This is how Milt Campbell became the first black man to win the decathlon gold, and the greatest athlete our state ever produced.
• • • 
We have cloudy mental images about November of ’56, but it was a heady time. It was the month Soviet tanks smashed Budapest to quell the Hungarian Revolution. It was the month Britain and France bombed Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal to their oil tankers. It was the month Fidel Castro and Che Guevera — six weeks out of Veracruz — could now see the coastline of the Cuban island they would soon take by revolution. It was the month that the Montgomery Bus Boycott, spawned by the courage of a tiny woman from Tuskegee named Rosa Parks, neared the end of its historic 381-day triumph against segregation.
On the other side of the world, in the Olympic Village not far from the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, Campbell received a visit two days before the competition began from Rafer Johnson, the UCLA sophomore who was favored to win the gold.
“Rafer sat on the bed and said, ‘So how do you think this is going to turn out?’” Campbell says. “And I just said, ‘This is a bad year for you to show up. Because this could be your two best days, but I’m still going to walk away with it.’
“And Rafer looked at me like I had hit him with a bat.”

Johnson did not return calls to share his recollection, but it was often reported that he arrived in Australia with a knee injury, and then a pulled stomach muscle early in the competition. He would get no sympathy from his chief rival.

“It was nothing personal,” Campbell says. “But I was getting a little tired of hearing that Rafer would prove he was the best athlete, and that wasn’t going to happen. I thanked him for being there, because the motivation was right for me.”
“That sounds a little over the top,” Denman says, “but if anyone would say that, it would be Milt. Rafer was a great athlete. But he wasn’t going to beat Milt that year even if he was healthy.”
And the speed by which Campbell dismissed the competition was historic.
The opening event on Nov. 29 was the 100 meters, which he ran in 10.8 seconds — one-tenth better than Johnson — to grab the lead in the standings. Then came the long jump, when Johnson reportedly suffered his stomach pull.
“I probably had the best long jump of my life (7.33 meters) and Rafer had probably the worst of his life (7.34),” Campbell says. “So I kept the lead, which was important.”
He completed the first day by finishing first in the shot put, second in the high jump to C.K. Yang of Taiwan (with Johnson placing sixth, a big slip), and second in the 400 meter. At the halfway point, Campbell led by 149 points, and on Friday, he would go for the kill.
The first event on Nov. 30 was the 110-meter hurdles. Take a look on YouTube sometime: Campbell covered it in 14 seconds flat, with a smooth efficiency that could only be described as machine-like. That time, in fact, would have been good enough to earn the bronze in the open event.
“Well, it was always my best event,” Campbell says. “And in fact, about a year later, I would set the world (indoor) record.”
With Johnson finishing fifth in the high hurdles, the rout was on. There were four events left, and they hardly mattered: Campbell finished second in the discus to stretch his lead, making the pole vault, javelin and 1,500 meters almost unnecessary. He would finish with a record 7,937 points, beating Johnson by 350 and Soviet Vasily Kuznetsov by 472.
• • • 
In the years ahead, he would presage the civil rights movement, becoming as uncompromising and fiercely independent as he is today. Campbell speaks of it more with irony than anger: As a black man in 1957, he knew he’d be less appreciated than other celebrated sportsmen of his era, but he never thought he’d have trouble getting a job in America.
His peers became American icons: Mathias, who won the decathlon in 1948 and ’52, went to Hollywood and landed in the halls of Congress; Johnson, who won the gold in 1960, went to Hollywood and landed inside the Kennedy family’s inner circle.

Manning/For The Star-LedgerMilt Campbell posses with his wife Linda Rusch at their home in Gainesville, Ga.

But there was no Wheaties box cover for Campbell, whose path was different. He was the Cleveland Browns’ fifth-round draft pick in ’57, but played only one season in the NFL — after which he claims he was blacklisted by owner Paul Brown for marrying a white woman — and then played in the Canadian Football League for eight.
His third act was almost preordained. He returned home to help Newark recover from the 1967 riots, he founded the Chad School and a community center, he talked thousands of kids in off the streets and into the classrooms, ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate in 2001, and became a highly valued motivational speaker.
In the end, that might be as big a part of Milt Campbell’s legacy as the Olympic gold.
But it’s not what we commemorate today. This is the day we salute an athletic master who coaxed astral-quality bursts of speed and power from his body — the only man who is in both the Track and Field and Swimming Halls of Fame, but somehow is still absent from the New Jersey Hall of Fame, though it has taken three years to get him on the ballot.
“Someone has to explain that to me,” Denman says.
Explain Milt Campbell, and his rightful place in history?
You find that only one man can do that.
“I remember a conversation I had when I was 14 with the track coach at Plainfield High,” Campbell says, referring to the great Harold Bruguiere. “And he asked me what I wanted to be. I told him, ‘The best athlete in Plainfield.’ Then it became ‘The best in New Jersey,’ and ‘The best in America’ and ‘The best in the world.’
“So I got a book on Jim Thorpe, we read through it and I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And from that moment I was determined to be the greatest.”
Fifty-five years later, that hasn’t changed.
Dave D'Alessandro: ddalessandro@starledger.com

Members of the New Jersey Hall of Fame are voted on by the public, which can make selections by visiting http://www.njhalloffame.org/