Johnson helping others grow
The man who had locked himself away from the world, violence has spent the past 47 years opening up doors
Those who knew Rafer Johnson tell their stories in sympathetic tones to those who didn’t, as if it were the lost opportunity of a lifetime.
Johnson was the 1960 Olympic champion in the decathlon. When his daughter, Jenny, began studying ancient Greece in elementary school, Johnson brought out his gold medal. For many years it was the only time she ever saw it.
“He was the guy folding up the chairs at the end of a concert, handing out drinks at our soccer games,” said Bill Shumard, who for 15 years was the head of Special Olympics Southern California, a cause that Johnson made his own. “To be honest, I never knew how to take him. He was so normal and understated. I don’t hesitate to say he’s the best person I’ve ever known.” Johnson, 86, died Wednesday. “The world has lost an incredible athlete,” said Bill Toomey, who won decathlon gold for the U. S. in the 1968 Olympics. “He broke through barriers because of his demeanor.”
Johnson’s final years were difficult, physically. Shumard remembers Johnson being helped onto a stage in October 2019 at the Santa Monica Pier to deliver an award at a Special Olympics function.
Johnson leaves behind his wife, Betsy, Jenny and son Josh, whom Rafer and Betsy watched compete in a U. S. Olympic Trials decathlon in Sacramento.
Jenny was an Olympian in beach volleyball. While at UCLA, she scheduled a summer trip to Kansas and Texas, for camps. Rafer
came to the office of volleyball coach Al Scates and said he was concerned there wouldn’t be adequate supervision for Jenny. He also said, “Don’t tell her I asked you that.”
“I watched Jenny play in a lot of club volleyball competitions when she was growing up,” Scates said, “and I saw Rafer at every one of them.”
But Johnson’s life was gloriously abnormal.
He was UCLA’s student body president five years before Congress passed civil rights legislation. In 1958, when the Soviet Union was forbidden territory and its leader promised to bury America, the U. S. sent a team to Moscow, and Johnson beat decathlon record- holder Vasily
Kuznetsov.
The fans cheered Johnson through the javelin and the 1,500 meters, then surrounded him, picked him up and tossed him into the air. An interpreter told a U. S. AAU official, “I do not understand. Russian people are not often so emotional.”
That was the year Johnson won Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year award. An auto accident in 1959 shattered Johnson’s training schedule for the Olympics, but he already knew how to recuperate. At 12 he got his leg caught in a cannery belt and had to take 23 stitches and walked with crutches for a time. He worked out anyway, developing a powerful upper body that gave him a huge advantage in the decathlon throwing events.
UCLA teammate C. K. Yang became the Olympic favorite in Rome. Both were coached by Elvin “Ducky”
Drake, and Johnson remembers getting 1,500- meter advice from Drake in Rome and then watching, bemused, to see Drake advising Yang as well.
Johnson stayed close enough to Yang in the 1,500 to win overall, and runnerup Yang became the first native of Taiwan, known as Nationalist China to Americans back then, to win an Olympic medal. The two were friends until Yang died in 2007.
“Those two guys singlehandedly created the charisma for that event,” Toomey said. “I couldn’t read enough stories about what they did.”
Johnson helped bring the 1984 Olympics to Los Angeles, and he was chosen to carry the Olympic torch into the Coliseum. He held it as he jogged around the track. He wore an allwhite singlet and shorts and looked for all the world like
a contestant. As he drove downtown that day, he asked Jenny to guess who the torchbearer might be. She guessed Michael Jackson, and Johnson smiled.
Johnson was involved in movies and television, was Gloria Steinem’s boyfriend for a time, and joined Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. Kennedy won the California primary, and Johnson and former Rams defensive tackle Rosey Grier were in the corridor behind the podium at L. A.’ s Ambassador Hotel when RFK was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan. A numb TV audience heard someone yell, “Get the gun, Rafer.”
Today, Johnson might have been a prime candidate to run for president, although he said he enjoyed sports because athletes could freely exchange ideas, unlike politicians. Not even Twitter would have laid a glove on his image.