Don Bragg, Olympic pole-vault champion, 83

SAN FRANCISCO ( AP) — Don Bragg, who was denied his dream of playing Tarzan in the movies but parlayed his imposing physique into a gold medal in the pole vault at the 1960 Rome Olympics, died on Saturday at his home in Oakley, Calif., near San Francisco.

He was 83.

His wife, Theresa Bragg, confirmed the death. She said he had been in failing health since having a stroke 10 years ago.

Competing in the era of relatively rigid aluminum poles, which required superior upper-body strength, the muscular Bragg, a 6-foot-3 200-pounder, dominated the pole vault in the late 1950s.

Already the holder of world indoor and outdoor records, Bragg vaulted 15 feet 5⅛ inches at the Rome Games – exceeding by almost six inches the Olympic record set by Bob Richards in 1956 – despite having injured a leg muscle a few weeks earlier. Bragg dueled for six and a half hours with his teammate Ron Morris, who won the silver medal, and then climbed the victory stand and let out a Tarzan yell.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Bragg had idolized the ape man famously played for many years in the movies by another Olympian, the swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.

“I went to a lot of Tarzan movies, and I was always trying to emulate him,” Bragg was quoted as saying in “Tales of Gold: An Oral History of the Summer Olympic Games Told by America’s Gold Medal Winners” (1987), by Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty. “I was always going to the woods, where I had a hideaway called Tarzanville. I’d be out there, swinging through the trees and trying to vault over poles that I’d place between the branches.”

Bragg used bamboo rods he got at a furniture store, where they had been used to wrap carpeting. While attending a track meet in Philadelphia when he was a sophomore at Penns Grove High School in New Jersey, he met Richards, who encouraged him to pursue the sport on a more formal basis.

Bragg was recruited for Villanova University by its renowned coach, Jumbo Elliott. In Bragg’s senior season, during the winter of 1957, he joined with the runners Ron Delany, Charlie Jenkins and Ed Collymore on one of collegiate track and field’s greatest squads.