sign in sign up
<<
Home , 1952 Rose Bowl, Bob Mathias, Frank Gifford, Olympic Decathlon, Roger Zatkoff

VOL. XX, NO. III MAY 2007 OLYMPIAN AND FOOTBALL PLAYER

By Keith McClellan

The recent death of Olympic champion Robert Bruce Mathias reminds many fans that Bob Mathias is the only man ever to participate in both the and the in the same year (Herman Brix won a silver medal in the shotput at the 1928 Olympics but his Rose Bowl appearance as a left tackle for Washington came in the 1926 Rose ). Given the hyperbolae about his political success, back-to-back wins in the Olympic decathlon -- with a world record performance in 1952 - the Sullivan Award as the nation's outstanding amateur athlete, and a leading role in a Hollywood movie about himself, it is easy to forget that he was a great college football player.

On November 17,1930, Bob became the second of four children born to Charles and Lillian Mathias, a family doctor and his wife, in Tulare, , a small farming town of 12,000 people in the . He entered as a freshman during World War II in the fall of 1944. Bob was a natural athlete, lifted two hundred pound bags of insecticide aboard crop dusting planes in the summer, and lettered all four years for the Tulare Redskins in basketball and track He was not allowed to play football as a high school sophomore because, according to the California Interscholastic Federation rules, he was too heavy to play in Class B football and too young to play in Class A.

As a junior at Tulare Union he played right halfback on offense in a modified double-wing system and . Then as a high school senior he played tailback and was the team captain. During his senior year he averaged more than eight yards a carry and scored 14 touchdowns, six on kick returns. Not only did he play both offense and defense, he kicked off, punted, and did the place-kicking.

After winning his first Olympic decathlon gold medal at the London Games at the age of seventeen in 1948, just after graduating from high school, Bob Mathias gained a provisional acceptance at , contingent on his improving his English grades. Consequently, in the fall of 1948 he enrolled at Kishiminetas Springs Preparatory School in Pennsylvania, where he started the football season at fullback In Kishi's first game against Indiana (PA) State Teachers College, he scored Kishi's only touchdown. In Kishi's second game his punting kept the Washington & Jefferson College freshmen scoreless. After being defeated by the Cornell University freshmen, 24-0, Mathias ran back an for a touchdown and a late-game victory over Western Reserve Academy. Finally, he caught passes to help defeat the Grove City College and the West Virginia University freshmen. After qualifying for admission to Stanford, Mathias repeated as the AAU decathlon champion on June 29-30, 1949.

In the fall of 1949, Bob Mathias entered Stanford University. In an effort to earn grades good enough to qualify for medical school, Bob did not play freshmen football, but he did report for PAGE 2 the freshmen track team. After setting Stanford University freshmen team records in the discus, the , the high hurdles, and the , and tallying nearly a third of the Stanford freshmen team's points in five dual meets, the Stanford University phenomenon set the American and World records in the decathlon at the AAU Championships held in his home town on June 30 and July 1,1950.

His unprecedented third consecutive AAU decathlon championship, with world record marks, gave rise to speculation that "Bob Mathias' decathlon achievements cast no doubt on his being hailed as the greatest all-around athlete of all time" - according to Dick Nash in the NCAA Track and Field Guide of 1951 - by bettering 's records, and those of all others, in nine of ten events. This claim was repeated in Jim Scott's 1952 , Bob Mathias: Champion of Champions.

In 1951 Mathias again attained All-American status in track and field by placing second in the discus at the NCAA Track and Field Championships. As a member of the Stanford varsity track team, he scored points in both the shot put and discus in 12 track meets. In eight meets he won the discus and placed second in the shot put in four meets.

While he was a track and field All-American for Stanford in 1950 and 1951, he did not play football until the fall of 1951 By that time it was clear that he did not have good enough grades to get into medical school, so he felt that he had little to lose by playing college football. He began the football season by fracturing a toe, and then bruised a thigh muscle. Bob failed to make the travel squad until the third game of the season, when he played sparingly on kick-off returns against the in Ann Arbor. He contributed little in the surprising 23-13 win over the Wolverines.

The track star's luck began to change following the Michigan game. The two veteran fullbacks ahead of Mathias on the depth chart both got injured and Mathias became the starting fullback for the UCLA game, in which he scored two touchdowns in Stanford's 21-7 win. The following week he scored two more touchdowns against Santa Clara as Stanford won 21-14, and he set up the winning Bob Mathias -- track star touchdown against the Washington Huskies with a 33-yard run and a five-yard pick-up on a fourth-and two play. On 13 carries in that 14-7 victory, he averaged 4.5 yards per carry.

In the second-to-last game of the season against the heavily favored University of Southern California team that was led by , Mathias made a come-from-behind tackle on the punt returning Trojan on a play that seemed destined to score a touchdown. In the fourth quarter, with the Trojans leading Stanford, 14-7, Mathias returned a kick-off 96 yards for a touchdown, avoiding Gifford along the way with a nifty move when the All-American was the only man between Mathias and the USC goal line. Late in the game, Mathias broke a 20-20 tie PAGE 3 to clinch the victory for Stanford by bowling over All-America line backer Pat Cannamela on one of the three short yardage runs that resulted in the winning score. This game figured to win the Stanford Indians a trip to the 1952 Rose Bowl to face the Big Ten champions.

During the November 17 game against Oregon State University, on Bob's 21st birthday, he suffered a painful hip injury that kept him out of practice most of the week preceding the final game of the regular season against the University of California Golden Bears, which Stanford lost 26-7. Nevertheless, Stanford still finished as the Pacific Coast Conference champions for 1951 with a record of 6-1-0 (9-2-0 overall). In the six games starting with the UCLA matchup, and ending with the Oregon State game, Mathias scored eight touchdowns, averaged 4.2 yards per carry, and averaged 25.2 yards per return on kickoffs. However, the 40-7 drubbing Stanford took at the hands of the University of Illinois "Fighting Illini" in the Rose Bowl on January 1,1952, took much of the luster out of the 1951 Stanford Indians football season.

In late July 1952 Bob Mathias won a gold medal and set another world record in the decathlon in the Olympics held at Helsinki, Finland, with the largest margin of victory in Olympic history. Mathias participated in a series of six post-Olympic meets in Europe following the Helsinki Games, and he arrived back in Palo Alto with a muscle pull a few days before the start of the 1952 football season. While Bob Mathias' exploits during the 1951 college football season have been widely reported, his 1952 season with Stanford has been largely ignored in almost all accounts of his athletic career.

The Stanford Indians opened their 1952 football season with an easy win over Santa Clara, 28-13, and then managed to sneak by Washington State 14-13 on September 20, on a day when the news was dominated by reports of the United Nations forces retaking Old Baldy on the Korean peninsula from the North Koreans, "by confusing the Reds with dummy attacks and fake radio messages." Donald Robinson, an assistant coach at the University of Michigan, was at the WSU game as a scout for 's Wolverine squad, and he reported that "Bob Mathias, the Olympic decathlon champion, who was rushed into the Stanford backfield could become the finest fullback in the country before the season ends. He's blazing fast and especially dangerous returning kicks." He might have added, in the language of the Hudson automobile advertisement, that Mathias "used a low center of gravity to get the hug-the-road stability."

Meanwhile, Coach Oosterbaan was determined to "stand pat on last week's offensive tactics using a single-wing attack that featured more running than passing," using his brawny, 215-pound quarterback, Ted Toper, to block on running plays and handle most passing chores. Oosterbaan was also trying to plug the holes in Michigan's pass defense that were exploited on September 20 by Michigan State in the loss to the archrival Spartans. The Michigan coach hoped that the return of ends Lowell Perry and Thad Stanford, and Roger Zatkoff would strengthen his lineup sufficiently to get revenge for their loss to Stanford the previous year.

The Wolverine coach's concern about his team's pass defense proved to be justified. In a nationally televised game from Palo Alto, Lowell Perry, still hobbled by a bum knee, interfered with Mathias on a pass from Bob Garrett on the one yard line in the closing minutes of the game. The pass interference call set the Stanford Indians up for the winning score on a Bob Mathias plunge up the middle on the following play to give the home team a 14-7 win. According to News sports reporter, Watson Spoelstra, "a burly Armenian, Essegian, the last of many of that nationality to people the Stanford lineup, knocked down a pass on the Stanford two yard line that might have won the game for Michigan." The Detroit News concluded: that "neither team is bowl material."

On October 11 Stanford, still undefeated, raced past the Oregon State Beavers 41-28 before 28,000 PAGE 4 fans in their second straight week playing at Palo Alto. According to the Los Angles Times, "Stanford's husky fullback, Bob Mathias, Olympic decathlon champion, went for a 61-yard scoring ramble in the third period."

But Stanford's luck ran out on October 18 against the UCLA Bruins in a matchup at the Los Angeles Coliseum in front of 80,617 loyal football fans. After the game that had seen the host Bruins knock off Stanford by a score of 24-14, "Red" Sanders, the UCLA coach, observed simply that, "Mathias is greatly improved" The Tulare native had scampered for 58 yards on 14 carries for an average of 4.1 yards per carry. He had also caught three passes for a total of 16 yards and scored a touchdown. The University of Washington Huskies, who had been known by the nickname "Sundodgers" until 1921, then tromped Stanford 27-14 on the last weekend in October to end the Indians' hopes of repeating as Pacific Coast Conference champions.

While Stanford recovered to overpower the San Jose State Spartans, 35-13, in Palo Alto the first weekend of November, the Indians would soon prove to be on a definite downward slide as the season rushed toward Thanksgiving and the close of the 1952 season. Mathias, "Skip" Crist, and Ron Clark were the big offensive weapons in the Stanford offense in the San Jose game. Midway through the second quarter according to the Los Angles Times report, "Mathias cracked over (the goal line) from the five to complete an 80-yard Stanford drive." It was his lone score of the day.

On November 8, Southern California embarrassed Stanford in a game at Palo Alto as the Trojans held Mathias to just 15 yards on six carries. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Braven Dyer had fun describing USC's awesome power being unleashed against their Northern California rival. Dyer wrote: "There was mayhem on the gridiron here this afternoon as Southern California 'murderized' Stanford 54 to 7, with an awesome display of versatility and power. Jess Hill's unbeaten Trojans ran their winning streak Bob Mathias vs Cal Bears to seven straight while wreaking the Indians so completely that fans were leaving the scene of the crime as early as the third quarter."

Art Rosenbaum, a San Francisco sportswriter, with a little political twist, added, " Chuck Taylor (the Stanford coach) had that 'Adlai Look - the what hit me daze and the forced smile that Adlai Stevenson had after the Tuesday landslide that made Ike the next President." Taylor said, "Don't ask me why. I know we didn't tackle, we didn't block, we didn't run -- we just didn't. The Trojans did everything right. We used everyone on the bench. I still say that a 37-man team is old-fashioned in this day of platoon football. About 42 would be right."

The next team to beat Stanford was Oregon. Things turned bad when Mathias fumbled the second half kickoff on his own thirteen yard line and the Oregon Ducks capitalized on the turnover. It was one of two turnovers, and along with a missed extra point attempt by Stanford, PAGE 5 it would be enough to allow the Ducks to eventually slip past the Indians for a 21-20 win. Even though Mathias' running for the day and his interception of a Ducks' pass that set up his 23-yard ramble just three plays later for a Stanford score did much to redeem him, his fumble had altered the Indians' game plan.

The final game of the 1952 Stanford season put to rest all speculation that Mathias was destined to be named the best fullback in college football that year. The University of California's fullback, Johnny B. Olszewski, who would become the Chicago Cardinals' first pick in the NFL draft on January 23,1953, rushed for 122 yards against Stanford and logged 2, 504 rushing yards for the season, while Mathias, who had been shifted to right halfback, did little to exemplify himself on the afternoon as Cal knocked off Stanford by a score of 26-0.

When that day was over, Bob Mathias declared that his football career was over. While he was eligible for one more season of football and not scheduled to graduate until December 1953, he hung up his jersey for good after the 1952 Cal game, coach Chuck Taylor later claimed that if Bob had committed himself to football as vigorously as he had to track and field he would have been a truly amazing player. It was also reported that Mathias was selected in the draft and that Bob later regretted that he had not followed Frank Gifford into pro football. The claim that the NFL had drafted Bob Mathias is untrue, although he, no doubt, had the athletic ability to have played pro ball successfully.