Reading up on David Sime, the white American guy who lost the 100 meter dash gold medal by an inch or two at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, I noticed that he grew up a Chip Hilton-style football-basketball-baseball star in high school without running track. In college at Duke, the track coach noticed his “lanky build” on the baseball field and asked him to try sprinting in his spare time. He instantly turned out to be one of the fastest sprinters in the world.

What’s characteristic of that era when white men were highly competitive in sprinting and in running and receiving the football is that Duke’s track coach assumed that lankiness equates with sprint speed.

It makes sense that carrying around less upper body muscularity would help you accelerate faster. It was widely perceived in American sports at the time that there was a distinct negative correlation between speed and elusiveness versus strength and robustness.

Thus on Duke’s football team, Sime played “lonely end” — i.e. a wide receiver who was a constant threat to catch a long touchdown pass but who wasn’t expected to go over the middle and get hammered multiple times per game. He was skinny like most white speedsters, so why get him killed?

Similarly, football offensive strategy drew a sharp distinction between the speedy, shifty halfback position and the bulldozer fullback position. Red Grange, the most famous college football player of the 1920s was a halfback who specialized in long touchdown runs. Bronco Nagurski, in contrast, was a power fullback. Army’s super team during WWII featured Glenn Davis at halfback as “Mr. Outside” and Doc Blanchard as fullback as “Mr. Inside.” Both won the Heisman.

NFL examples include Green Bay’s golden boy halfback Paul Hornung and formidable fullback Jim Taylor. A more recent example, was Miami’s combination of speedster halfback Mercury Morris and rhinoceros fullback Larry Czonka.

Starting in the later 1950s, however, the black Jim Brown demonstrated both strength and speed, rewriting the NFL record books for yards rushing. But Brown was seen as as a unique figure. It was widely assumed that the negative correlation between speed and strength observed among white football players applied equally to blacks.

Perhaps a key figure in undermining this assumption of racial equality was Bob Hayes, the black gold medalist in the 100m dash in the 1964 Olympics, who was described in news reports as “burly.” Clearly, his broad build puzzled sportswriters used to writing about lean Dave Sime-like white sprinters. Hayes went on to an impressive career as an NFL receiver.

This assumption of racial equality in the speed-strength tradeoff was conclusively disproven at the University of Southern California from 1965-1981

Starting in the mid-60s USC turned itself into Tailback U. by dumping the idea of running backs being naturally divided into speedy halfbacks and durable fullbacks. Instead, it positioned the team’s superstar ball carrier, the tailback, a full seven yards behind the line of scrimmage and let him carry the ball an ungodly number of times per game (e.g., 51 times in the late Ricky Bell’s 347 yard game). Rather than try to recruit role-playing halfbacks and fullbacks, USC recruited superstar tailbacks who combined speed, elusiveness, strength, and durability.

USC’s first Heisman running back was Mike Garrett in 1965. In 1967 arrived the most famous college player since Red Grange: O.J. Simpson. O.J. also ran track for USC and was on a world record setting sprint relay team. Simpson put together strength, speed, elusiveness, and endurance to wrack up numbers that were unknown in college football before him. For example, in the one game I attended at the Coliseum as a child, O.J. carried 47 times for 238 yards.

Then came Clarence Davis, Ricky Bell, Charles White, and Marcus Allen. (In the early 1970s, USC wound up with two superstar running backs at once, Sam Cunningham and Anthony Davis, but still chose eventually to feature Davis as the tailback).

All of Tailback U.’s tailbacks were black.

But was this purely genetics?

How many USC superstars were on steroids before the rest of the country caught up is one of those interesting historical questions that nobody is interested in. By the end of the 1950s, steroids were showing up at Muscle Beach in Venice and in sword and sandal movies. There wasn’t a huge social chasm between USC football players and Hollywood. For example, USC football player Marion Morrison had become Hollywood legend John Wayne.

O.J., of course, went on to enjoy a Hollywood career as well:

Looking at USC’s list of most yards rushing in a game and how these superhuman feats pile up overwhelmingly between Simpson and Allen (two beaus of the late Nicole Brown Simpson, by the way), I get the feeling that Tailback U.’s tailbacks weren’t just born, they were made.

But whatever really happened remains lost in the mists of recent history.