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Mathias a winner in athletics, life

Fullback, actor, veteran, politician, but the decathlon continued to define Bob Mathias.

By TIMES WIRES
Published September 4, 2006

"His form was atrocious. He gripped the spear like a guy killing a chicken. He went over the vault like a guy falling out of a moving car and his high jump looked like a guy leaving a banana peel," the late Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray once wrote. "All he did was win."

Bob Mathias, a two-time Olympic decathlon champion, Stanford football standout and four-term Congressman, died late Saturday at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 75 and the cause was throat cancer.

He was 17 when he finished first in the 1948 London Games and won the Sullivan Award as the nation's top amateur athlete. In 1952 at Helsinki, Finland, he became the first decathlete to defend an Olympic title. A few months before, Mr. Mathias led Stanford to the Rose Bowl by returning a kickoff 96 yards to help beat USC and win the Pacific Coast Conference title. He sidestepped the Trojans' Frank Gifford near the end zone on the play. Mr. Mathias became the only man to play in the Rose Bowl, which Illinois won 40-7, and win an Olympic gold medal the same year. The Washington Redskins drafted the fullback, but he never played pro football.

"I can't fathom anybody who competed with him who didn't love him," said Rafer Johnson, the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medalist who grew up near Mr. Mathias in Kingsburg, Calif.

When Mr. Mathias retired from decathlon competition in 1952 he had nine victories in nine competitions, four U.S. championships, three world records and two Olympic golds, all before the age of 22.

"Bob Mathias was the real champion," said fellow U.S. Olympian Sammy Lee, who won diving gold medals in '48 and '52. "He did not need performance-enhancing drugs that these athletes are using today."

In 1956, President Eisenhower sent Mr. Mathias and Lee on a goodwill tour to Southeast Asia. While in Kuala Lumpur, Lee relaxed in an air-conditioned hotel room after a diving exhibition.

Mr. Mathias came in from the sweltering heat asking, "What are you doing here?"

Lee, now 86, said he was done for the day.

"I just finished five events and now I have to race every Tom, Dick and Harry in the next five events," Mr. Mathias said and left, smiling.

He was an officer in the Marine Corps from 1954-56. In 1954, he played the title role in a movie about his life, The Bob Mathias Story. He acted in other films then moved into politics, where he served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1960s and '70s.

"The hardest thing about being a politician was learning to say no," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "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 percent of the people like you, you can stay in office. In that world, people stomp on you and say bad things about you."

Mr. Mathias was the first director of the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs from 1977-83 and helped push through the Amateur Sports Act in 1978, which broke the AAU's stranglehold on track and field and Olympic sports in the United States.

[Last modified September 4, 2006, 02:15:03]