Rafer Johnson obit

 

Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, who helped bring Summer Games to L.A., dies at 86

 He was not on the list.

As the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles neared, city leaders knew they needed to start strong. Many doubted the city could pull off such a global event, and a weak or botched opening ceremony might prove them right.

 

For the key role of lighting the Olympic flame, organizers chose Rafer Johnson, winner of the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medal and one of the city’s most treasured athletes. But in preparation for the opening ceremony, Johnson discovered a problem.

 

Plans called for Johnson to carry the Olympic torch up the progressively steeper stairs of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and then up an even steeper — and shaky — set of steps to a platform where he was to turn to the crowd, flaming torch in hand, and open the Games by igniting a gas jet. But the top step was so narrow, and the riser so wobbly, that Johnson asked for a handhold to be installed.

 

The producer of the ceremony protested, saying a handhold would ruin photos of the moment.

 

“What would be a worse picture,” Johnson replied, “me holding on to something or me falling headfirst down to the floor of the Coliseum?”

 

Johnson got the handhold, and his lighting of the Olympic flame proved to be an iconic moment in a widely praised ceremony.

 

It was a fulfilling role for Johnson, a man whose legacy was interwoven with Los Angeles’ history, beginning with his performances as a world-class athlete at UCLA and punctuated by the night in 1968 when he helped disarm Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin at the Ambassador Hotel.

 

Forever a civic booster in the metropolis where he lived, Johnson died Wednesday at his home in Sherman Oaks. The Olympian’s death was confirmed by his family. He was 86.

 

The son of Texas farmworkers who moved to California when he was young, Johnson rose to become the World’s Greatest Athlete, the unofficial title bestowed on the winner of the Olympic decathlon at a time when track and field stars received the adulation that today is bestowed on the best of the NFL and NBA.

 

At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Johnson was the U.S. team’s flag bearer, the first Black American so honored. His decathlon battle that year with C.K. Yang — his training partner at UCLA — ranks among the classic moments of Olympics history.

 

In an eventful life, Johnson broke racial barriers, played an unexpected role in the international relations of the Cold War and immersed himself in the turbulent politics of the 1960s. To help disabled children, Johnson co-founded the California Special Olympics in 1969 and served as its president for 10 years.

 

In contrast to the anything-to-win attitudes often found in sports today, the deeply religious Johnson was always a vocal advocate for fair play and good sportsmanship. He eschewed drugs and alcohol and, in track races, refused even to try to anticipate the starter’s gun, believing that it was a form of cheating.

 

“It seems funny to say winning is not all-important — I always want to win, and no one likes to lose,” he once said. “But when you start out on the field, everyone is equal. That is the important idea.”

Rafer Lewis Johnson was born during the Depression, on Aug. 18, 1934, in Hillsboro, Texas, the second of six children born to Lewis Johnson, a cotton picker and farm handyman, and Alma Gibson Johnson. After a brief move to Oklahoma, the family returned to Texas when Johnson was 3 and settled in a Dallas home with no electricity or indoor plumbing.

 

When he was 9, Johnson’s parents, in search of a fresh start and better opportunities for their children, moved to the San Joaquin Valley town of Kingsburg, where most of the residents were of Swedish descent. The Johnsons were the only Black family.

 

Johnson and his siblings would join his parents picking cotton after school, on weekends, holidays and all summer. Johnson believed the hard work not only made him strong, but gave him discipline that would later help make him a successful athlete. In his 1998 autobiography, he wrote, “Thinking about picking cotton brings tears to my eyes to this day, just from remembering how hard my parents had to toil to earn a meager living.”

 

He recalled his father as a “kind, hard-working family man” when he was sober, but a “hell-raising drunk” who beat his wife when he’d been drinking. It was a specter that would loom over much of Johnson’s life.

 

Johnson remembered his years in Kingsburg fondly, saying it was like a “Frank Capra movie.” Still, there were dangers. Johnson once saved his brother Jimmy from drowning at a local swimming hole. Jimmy Johnson would later go on to play for the San Francisco 49ers and be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

 

Johnson was a four-sport star in high school, lettering in football, baseball, basketball and, his favorite, track and field. “There was something pure and innocent about the sport: You ran, you jumped, you threw things, just as young men had done since the dawn of civilization,” he wrote in his autobiography.

 

For college, Johnson chose UCLA, in part because its alumni included Jackie Robinson, who broke the racial barrier in Major League Baseball, and Ralph Bunche, the first Black American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

Still, Johnson encountered racism on campus. One white woman he was seeing was forced to choose between her sorority membership and dating a Black man. A fraternity rejected Johnson as a member because he was Black. But he was accepted elsewhere and became the first Black American to join a national fraternity at UCLA — Pi Lambda Phi.

 

Johnson’s fast ascendancy as a decathlete drew national attention. He won the Pan American Games in 1955, earning a spot on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He then broke the world record for the decathlon, establishing himself as the favorite for the 1956 Olympics.

 

But a knee injury and torn stomach muscle hampered Johnson and he finished second at the Games in Melbourne, Australia, a bitter disappointment.

 

Back at UCLA, Johnson was elected student body president, a position that brought him “a pile of hate mail,” he recalled, with one letter asking, “Who do you think you are, black boy?”

 

In 1958, with Cold War tensions at their height, much of the world’s attention was drawn to the first U.S.-USSR track meet, to be held in Moscow. In the spotlight was the battle to be the World’s Greatest Athlete between Johnson and Vasili Kuznetsov, who held the world record then.

 

Onlookers built it up as a battle between communism and the free world, a role that made Johnson uncomfortable.

 

“I was fully aware of the irony that a Black man was an emissary of a nation where discrimination raged and racists got away with lynchings,” he said. “I found myself affected by the political overtones despite my efforts to ignore them.”

 

In the end, Johnson turned in his best decathlon yet, beating Kuznetsov and again breaking the world record. When it was all done, the Soviet crowd rushed the field, and Johnson thought they were going to attack him. Instead, they raised him on their shoulders and shouted his name.

 

“Never in the history of track has an athlete performed so well as Rafer Johnson in Moscow,” wrote Sports Illustrated.

 

In 1958-59, Johnson played basketball for legendary UCLA coach John Wooden and began training with Yang, a Taiwanese athlete who had come to UCLA and emerged as a decathlete nearly as strong as Johnson. The competitive rivals would develop a unique friendship.

 

“Ours was the purest of rivalries,” Johnson recalled. “We each wanted the other guy to do well, but we wanted even more to win.”

Filmography

 

Actor

 

    The Sins of Rachel Cade (1960) – Kosongo

    Wild in the Country (1961) – Davis

    Pirates of Tortuga (1961) – John Gammel

    None but the Brave (1965) – Pvt. Johnson

    Tarzan and the Great River (1967) – Barcuma, Afro-Brazilian leader of the Jaguar Cult

    Tarzan and the Jungle Boy (1968) – Nagambi, villain who hinders Tarzan's search for the Jungle Boy

    The Last Grenade (1970) – Joe Jackson

    Soul Soldier (1970) – Pvt. Armstrong

    The Games (1970) – Commentator

    Roots: The Next Generations (1979)

    Licence to Kill (1989) – Mullens

    Think Big (1990) – Johnson

 

Production roles

 

    Billie (1965, technical advisor)

    The Black Six (1973, associate producer)