Bob Mathias: Olympian and Football Player
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VOL. XX, NO. III MAY 2007 BOB MATHIAS OLYMPIAN AND FOOTBALL PLAYER By Keith McClellan The recent death of Olympic decathlon champion Robert Bruce Mathias reminds many college football fans that Bob Mathias is the only man ever to participate in both the Rose Bowl and the Olympic Games 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 Bowl game). 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, California, a small farming town of 12,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley. He entered Tulare Union High School 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 defensive back. 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 Stanford University, 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 interception 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 shot put, the high hurdles, and the pole vault, 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 track and field athlete of all time" - according to Dick Nash in the NCAA Track and Field Guide of 1951 - by bettering Jim Thorpe's records, and those of all others, in nine of ten events. This claim was repeated in Jim Scott's 1952 biography, 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 University of Michigan 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 Frank Gifford, 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 Bennie Oosterbaan'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.