Texas’ best left mark
Trio of track stars in Hansen, Matson and Cassell reflect on contributing to U.S. medal haul during time in Tokyo
TOKYO — The Americans arrived at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics dressed as Wild West conquerors, with the men wearing comically undersized Stetson-style hats in an apparent nod to President Lyndon Johnson, who in real life wouldn’t be caught dead wearing such a feebly faux Texas chapeau.
This was the team of Bob Hayes, the planet’s fastest human and a future NFL star; Bill Bradley, the Rhodes scholar who became a future NBA star and U.S. senator; and Smokin’ Joe Frazier, a few years away from becoming world heavyweight boxing champion.
Also marching that day were four-time gold medal-winning swimmer Don Schollander, swimmer and future TV analyst Donna De Varona, veteran throwers Dallas Long and Al Oerter, and distance runners Bob Schul and Billy Mills, the last U.S. men to win the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, respectively.
From elsewhere came such marvels as Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, who won his second consecutive marathon; the elegant gymnasts Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia and Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union; Australian freestyle swimmer Dawn Fraser, Soviet high jumper Valeriy Brumel and middle-distance double-winner Peter Snell of New Zealand.
Texas contributed three names to the United States’ 90 medals in 1964 — pole vaulter Fred Hansen from Rice University by way of Cuero, Texas A&M freshman shot putter Randy Matson of Pampa and University of Houston sprinter Ollan Cassell.
They were part of a United States men’s track team that won 12 of 24 events and 19 total medals, swamping the Soviet Union’s two golds and eight total in a highly visible Cold War rivalry.
All have fond memories of the first Tokyo Olympics — Hansen, a retired dentist, planned to attend the Games before Japanese authorities decreed no spectators would be allowed — and of visiting a country that had been at war with the United States less than two decades earlier.
Hansen part of notable duel
Had the world not changed with the COVID-19 pandemic, Hansen would have returned to Japan last year to celebrate his memorable 1964 victory in the pole vault.
“I was looking forward to going back with my wife,” Hansen said. “We had a great time there in 1964. I remember going shopping and buying a nice string of pearls for my mother and a camera for myself.”
Hansen, who turns 81 in December, prevailed in one of the more memorable pole vault competitions at the Olympics. It took more than nine hours to complete, ending when Hansen cleared the bar on his third attempt at 16 feet, 8 ¾ inches after West German Wolfgang Reinhart failed on his third and final attempt.
The Reinhart-Hansen duel has a prominent place in the official film “Tokyo Olympiad.” As Hansen is preparing for his final jumps, fans can be heard in the background chanting “We like Hansen, rah, rah, rah.”
“I remember hearing that, and the Germans had a chant, too,” Hansen said.
Hansen entered the Olympics under considerable pressure as the world record-holder at 17-3¾. Entering 1964, the United States had not lost a pole vault at the Olympics since its inception in 1896; the streak would continue until a dispute over pole technology forced Bob Seagren to use a borrowed pole in 1972, when he was second after winning in 1968.
Hansen’s wins came with the new fiberglass pole, which was introduced in the early 1960s. He started jumping, however, as a sixth grader in Cuero, using a cane pole that came wrapped in carpet delivered to the family home.
“I took that pole and started jumping over tables and chairs, and then my dad got some athletic tape to wrap around it,” he said. “About a year later, my dad got some river sand and built me a pit to jump into.”
The cane pole broke when Hansen was in junior high, and he switched to the traditional steel pole to win a University Scholastic League championship. He accepted a scholarship to Rice and coached himself with help from Rice assistant track coach Augie Erfurth, who offered tips after film study with Hansen.
Hansen broke the pole vault down to seven phases and tracked his progress through film study. He also took a tip from former world record-holder Brian Sternberg and trained using gymnastics equipment at the downtown Houston YMCA.
“I had a lot of upper body strength after working on the rings and parallel bars and rope climbing,” he said. “I could climb that rope upside down at one point.”
Hansen won Southwest Conference titles in the pole vault and long jump at Rice and twice set the world record in the summer of 1964 before the Olympics.
He could have gone for another world record after clearing 16-8¾, “but by that time it was 10 p.m. Our meets usually lasted two or three hours, so I said, ‘Let’s just go home,’ and I got my gold medal at around 10:30 p.m.”
Hansen retired after the Olympics and attended Baylor University’s dental school in Dallas. He practiced in Houston, mostly in the Memorial area, before retiring 12 years ago.
Rice would go on to producer another Olympic vaulter, 1976 bronze medalist Dave Roberts, who in 1976 became the most recent U.S. jumper to hold the world record. The current record is 20-3¼ by Armand Duplantis of Sweden.
Matson shined among greats
Matson burst onto the scene as a 19-year-old freshman at Texas A&M and became one of the most dominant shot putters of the last century, winning 73 of 79 competitions from 1965 through 1971, including the 1968 Olympic gold medal.
His big break, he said, came in 1963, when he was selected after a good performance at the national AAU meet to tour Europe with a group of American athletes. That set him on course, he said, for 1964, when he made the Olympic
team, eventually finishing second behind two-time gold medalist Dallas Long.
“I was still very young, and there was a different kind of pressure,” he said. “I was on the team with Parry O’Brien and Dallas Long, guys I used to watch on theater newsreels. It was quite an experience.
“Tokyo in 1964 wasn’t that far removed from World War II. I didn’t know what to expect from the Japanese people, but when we walked into the stadium for the opening ceremony, they cheered us all the way around the track.”
Long won with an Olympic-record throw of 66-8½, beating Matson at 66-3. From then, however, Matson went on to break the world record twice, becoming the first man to crack 70 feet in the event before throwing 71-5½ in 1967 and winning the 1968 gold medal in Mexico City.
Matson, 76, was a two-time state and NCAA Outdoor champion in both the shot put and discus, winning the 1967 Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete.
After graduating from Texas A&M, he worked as a stock broker in New York and Houston and worked at West Texas A&M before returning to College Station as a longtime executive with the Association of Former Students and the Texas A&M Foundation.
There wasn’t a more-stereotypical Texan than Matson at 6 feet 7 and 265 pounds, so the U.S. team’s puny Stetson was particularly undersized as he marched in the 1964 Opening Ceremony.
“Trading was a big deal back then, and I think I traded mine to a guy for a pair of sunglasses,” Matson said. “He got the better of the deal. I think I lost the sunglasses on the plane ride home.
“But that wasn’t a real Texas hat, anyway.”
Cassell helped U.S. to gold
Unlike Hansen and Matson, Cassell made international Olympic sports his career, working as executive director of the AAU and of USA Track and Field into the late 1990s after leaving the University of Houston.
Cassell, 83, came to UH after a year at East Tennessee State. His coach, who felt he had championship potential, suggested he go to a place that offered “more emphasis on track and field, good competition on a daily basis and good people to train with.”
The coach suggested UH, and Cassell left Johnson City, Tenn., to train with UH’s highly regarded track coach, Johnny Morris. He won the first Olympic Trials in 1964 in the 400 meters but injured his leg later in the year that he said hampered his training.
In Tokyo, Cassell won his opening heat and was second in the quarterfinals but faded to fifth in his semifinal as teammate Mike Larrabee went on to win the gold medal.
Cassell ran the second leg in the 4-by-400 relay prelims but was moved to lead off the gold-medal final for teammates Larrabee, Ulis Williams and Henry Carr, who won the event in the world-record time of 3:00.7.
He cherishes the medal but also enjoys memories of Japan and of Olympic Village visits with friends and competitors that likely won’t be repeated for this year’s athletes because of COVID-19 restrictions.
“Even though it was like 20 years after World War II, they had rebuilt that country back to a standard equal to any in the world,” he said. “We ate with British, French or Russian friends and visited their dorms, and it was a good feeling about a time when you could spend time with friends even while you were trying to beat them.”
Cassell said that while he would have liked a medal in the individual 400, “I felt the relay was just as important because you had three other people depending on you.”
After leaving UH, he was one of the most powerful figures in track and field as the sport moved to a more professional foothold and away from the standards of the old AAU days. He remained on the international federation’s council through 2019.
Cassell said he favors reforms to make track and field more accessible to a larger audience. One plan that never saw fruition, in conjunction with the late Houston City Council member John Kelley, was to repurpose the Astrodome as an indoor arena with outdoor track proportions that could have hosted the 2012 Olympics.