U.S. OLYMPIC SPRINTER WON THREE GOLD MEDALS
‘FASTEST NI CE CHRISTI AN BOY IN THE WORLD’
For a brief period in the Eisenhower era, the world’s fastest man was arguably the American sprinter who trained on his family’s cotton and carrot farm, chased jackrabbits through the Rio Grande Valley and turned down scholarship offers from major schools to attend a small Christian college in west Texas.
From 1956 to 1958, Bobby Morrow won all the major sprinting titles for which he competed, capped by three gold medals at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. Not since Jesse Owens had a sprinter so dominated the Olympic track. Not until Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt would a man do so again.
Morrow set 14 world records, according to the international governing body World Athletics, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, landed on the cover of Life magazine and was named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated, beating out baseball’s Mickey Mantle, who had just won the triple crown of hitting, and Don Larsen, who pitched the only perfect game in World Series history.
But as the years went by, Morrow retreated from the public eye and was largely forgotten, described in a 2016 Guardian headline as “the greatest Olympic sprinter you’ve never heard of.” Frustrated by his ill-fated business ventures, media coverage and lastminute rejection from the 1960 U. S. Olympic team, he returned to his hometown in the valley, where he ran a sugarcane farm and woodworking business and, as he had in his youth, outpaced rabbits, catching one in each hand to surprise his youngest daughter.
He was 84 when he died May 30 at his home in Harlingen, Texas. His daughter Elizabeth Kelton said he had a blood disorder and chose to go into hospice care rather than continue treatment.
Morrow was a 21- year- old student at Abilene Christian College, now a university, when he travelled 48 hours by plane to compete in Melbourne. Humble and handsome, with close- cropped brown hair, he was a lay preacher who neither drank nor smoked, and he became a 6- foot-1 poster child for his Churches of Christ- affiliated college. Texas Monthly would later call him the “Fastest Nice Christian Boy in the World.”
“Bobby had a fluidity of motion like nothing I’d ever seen,” Abilene Christian coach Oliver Jackson told Sports Illustrated in 2000. “He could run a 220 with a root beer float on his head and never spill a drop. I made an adjustment to his start when Bobby was a freshman. After that, my only advice to him was to change his major from ag sciences to speech, because he’d be destined to make a bunch of them.”
Morrow won gold in the 100 metres with an official time of 10.5 seconds, then matched the world record of 20.6 seconds in the 200 metres, while running with a bandaged thigh.
Less than a week later, he anchored the U. S. team on the 4- by100 relay, taking the baton after teammates Baker, Ira Murchison and Leamon King gave the Americans a slight edge over the Soviets. Morrow extended their lead, helping his team set a world record of 39.5 seconds, breaking a mark that Owens had helped set 20 years earlier.
Morrow returned to the U. S. a superstar, so popular that Abilene Christian assigned a public relations official to field his interview and appearance requests. He visited the White House, received the AAU’S James E. Sullivan Award in 1957 as the nation’s most outstanding amateur athlete and was inducted into the National Track & Field Hall of Fame in 1975. “He was the finest sprinter of his era,” Olympic historian David Wallechinsky told the Guardian. “But it was a short era.”
Morrow’s criticisms of the U. S. Olympic program were sometimes cited as a reason he missed the 1960 Games in Rome. A strained thigh muscle limited him during the Olympic trials, but he was invited to train with the U.S. team in Los Angeles as a potential reserve. By all accounts, he began to beat many of his teammates, even as he waited for confirmation that he could compete in Italy.
“The coach, Larry Snyder, instructed me to show up at the airport in Los Angeles and accompany the team to Rome,” Morrow later told Sports Illustrated. “But when I got to the airport, he said there was no room for me on the plane.”
By then, the easygoing running style that had brought him fame and glory was gone — “I was running all tied up,” Morrow said — and he retired from track, just as business associates left him feeling betrayed. He said he was cheated out of money after trying to market a dietary supplement, Stim- O- Stam, and felt used after delivering speeches and being photographed alongside Billie Sol Estes, a sweet- talking Texas businessman who later served two stints in prison for fraud.
By the end of the 1960s, his first marriage had collapsed as well. He said he missed the farm, and returned to the Rio Grande Valley, occasionally signing autographs and delivering motivational speeches.
“Sometimes it got a little frustrating, the amount of attention,” Kelton said. “He really didn’t see his gifts as anything special. He always said: ‘It’s not like I cured cancer. I just ran.’”
“The world has changed since I first left the farm,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2000, for a profile titled “Blue, Blue Days.” “The values that I learned have disappeared. People screw people these days and think nothing of it. They enjoy it. I can’t operate that way, which is why” — he laughed — “some people would say that I haven’t amounted to a damn thing.”
The middle of three children, Bobby Joe Morrow was born in Rangerville, Tex. on Oct. 15, 1935. He played halfback on the football team at San Benito High before running his first varsity race as a sophomore, on a dusty track that his father smoothed via tractor.
Morrow’s marriages to Jo Ann Strickland and Judy Bolus ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter from his second marriage, survivors include his partner of 20 years, Judy Parker; a son and daughter from his first marriage, and eight grandchildren.
THE VALUES THAT I LEARNED HAVE DISAPPEARED. PEOPLE SCREW PEOPLE THESE DAYS AND THINK NOTHING OF IT . THEY ENJOY IT . I CAN’T OPERATE THAT WAY, WHICH IS WHY SOME PEOPLE WOULD SAY THAT I HAVEN’T AMOUNTED TO A DAMN THING. — BOBBY JOE MORROW