Dave Sime, 79; Olympic sprinter, renowned eye doctor
One of the most compelling American athletes of the 20th century died last week. Odds are that you have not heard of Dave Sime. He never played professional sports. He took more pride in his post-athletic career as a world-class eye doctor in Miami than anything he accomplished on the fields of play. His name wasn’t even pronounced the way it looks. Forget the “e” — Sime rhymes with him, not lime.
Some readers will remember his son-in-law, Ed McCaffrey, who as a wide receiver won three Super Bowl rings during the 1990s, two with the Denver Broncos and one with the San Francisco 49ers. An even greater number of football fans probably know of his grandson, Christian McCaffrey, the most electric all-purpose back in college last season, leading Stanford to the Pacific-12 title and a victory in the Rose Bowl.
But when David William Sime died of a heart attack at age 79, it brought to a close a singular life story that played out on the world’s stage. For a time in the mid-1950s, Sime was considered the fastest man in the world. He ended up with only one Olympic silver medal to his name, but if not for various misfortunes — an injury, the questionable ethics of a haughty West German opponent who beat him at the tape and the disqualification of a relay teammate — Sime might have won three golds, one in Melbourne in 1956 and two in Rome in 1960. And if not for what he considered the brusque, off-putting behavior of an intelligence agent at a restaurant on the Via Merulana, he might have returned from Rome with a more important prize, the defection of a Soviet athlete.
If his grandson can do it all in football, it was Sime who set the standard for all-purpose. As a 13-year-old from Fairview, New Jersey, he won a speed-skating contest at Madison Square Garden, an accomplishment that made the front page of the New York Daily News. This despite the fact that he hated to skate. He was so talented at football that he was recruited to play at West Point by an assistant coach named Vince Lombardi (and later drafted by the Detroit Lions).
His favorite sport was basketball, the game of his father, who had played briefly for the old Original Celtics based in New York. But when he enrolled at Duke University, it was not for football or basketball but to roam center field on the baseball team, and once at Duke, his raw speed led him to the track and national stardom in the dashes.
Sime taught himself the art of sprinting by reading every book on the subject in the university library. In the Jim Crow South, the big redhead often trained privately alongside track stars at Durham’s historically black college, North Carolina Central, including its world-renowned hurdler, Lee Calhoun.