American Bobby Morrow won three medals on the track at the 1956 Olympic Games before rapidly falling out of the limelight

Former high school classmates have attempted to visit him at his San Benito, Texas farm. Old friends have tried again and again to call and catch up. It seems that at least for now, 80-year-old Bobby Morrow, an all-time great Olympic sprinter who for decades has struggled to deal with the notoriety surrounding his achievements, has chosen to live out his years in isolation.

Sixty years ago, in 1956, it was a different story altogether. Morrow was an invincible 21-year old who had rocketed to fame after putting together the most dominant athletics performance since Jesse Owens. The highly criticized new cinder track at the Melbourne Cricket Ground couldn’t stop Morrow, nor could a virus that knocked 10lbs off his 6ft frame just days before the Games. Only a powerful headwind prevented Morrow from setting a world record 100m run, storming past “The Queensland Hurricane” Hector Hogan halfway through his race for gold.



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In the 200m, Morrow, known as “the most relaxed sprinter of all-time” had his cheeks flapping about as he powered past the field in 20.6 seconds, breaking Owens’ 20-year-old record. “ I wanted to emulate the great Owens,” said Morrow after his run. Another Owens record would fall next: the 4x100m world mark that had previously been set with the icon as anchor.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bobby Morrow wins the 100m in Melbourne 1956.

Fifteen years ago, I met with a reflective Morrow, who in one of his more upbeat moments said: “I was born and raised right here on this farm and it’s amazing that a kid you know a little town like San Benito could be able to go to the Olympic Games and you know you have to pinch yourself every once and a while, even now.”

For Morrow, it all began in those sprawling cotton fields where the competition was his cousins. He dominated at San Benito High School where he played sports against Bert Keys.

“Nobody ever did it like he did it,” said Keys. “When the gun went off he was off and running. He was unbelievable. And the thing about it was, for the first 20 or 30 yards, people could keep up with him, but by the last 20 or 30 yards he was all alone.”

By 1953, college scouts from the Southern California track powerhouses gathered in southeastern Texas to watch the “San Benito Bullet” run in the high school state championships. But Morrow, then described as an “ultraconservative Christian” declined a scholarship with the established track schools, got married and stayed in the state, attending Abilene Christian College, where he would help form a Texas sports dynasty.

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“I saw him run several times,” said his coach Oliver Jackson,” who died in 2007. “And I knew right then that he was a pure thoroughbred.”

Jackson, who would go on to coach four Olympic champions, told Sports Illustrated that “Bobby had a fluidity of motion like nothing I’d ever seen. 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 agricultural sciences to speech, because he’d be destined to make a bunch of them.”

Despite the fact that Morrow ran a then-unthinkable 9.3 seconds in the 100-yard dash, the same Southern California track experts that sought his signature for college were wary of Morrow’s talents heading into the 1956 Olympic trials.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Morrow winning in the 100m heats at the 1956 Olympics. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

“They were always skeptical of people from Texas anyway because you know they’d say, well you had a big wind behind you [a reference to the belief that Texan track meets often had big tail winds doe to the flat terrain],” Morrow said. “How much wind did you have? They always brought up that angle of it. How much wind did you have? So we always had to do a little better so we could say that didn’t make any difference.”

Morrow’s dominated the trials at the Los Angeles Coliseum, qualifying easily with wins in the 100m and 200m, dismissing any doubts about being pushed ahead by Texas winds. In Melbourne, Morrow, who benefited by the absence of his chief rival, the injured Dave Sime, cruised to multiple victories.

Morrow’s fame exploded: he made the cover of Time, Sport and Sports Illustrated, and beat out Mickey Mantle, Frank Gifford and Paul Hornung for SI’s Sportsman of the Year Award. The Texan also appeared on several television programs, including the larger than life Ed Sullivan Show. While such popularity would be a dream scenario for many, for Morrow, it was the start of decades of disillusionment.



“He was the finest sprinter of his era,” said Olympic historian David Wallechinksy. “But it was a short era.”

The souring surrounding his new post-Olympic success actually began in Melbourne, where Morrow was quick to catch on to the injustices of amateurism. In the time before Olympic sprinting medals translated into wealth, shoe companies’ interaction with athletes was limited to “if you’re going to go to the bathroom you may want to use the third stall on the right [to pick up your money]” according to Wallechinsky.



Morrow was particularly stung by what he saw as hypocrisy surrounding the controversial Avery Brundage, who headed up the US Olympic Committee from 1930 through 1953. Morrow told Sports Illustrated that there were plenty of food and accommodation perks for “...a bunch of guys whose job was to hand out soap and towels, because they had to find something for them to do.”

Morrow would later attempt to right what he believed were the wrongs of the era, and despite having to hand over television quiz show winnings to his university - he could donate money linked to athletics but not profit from it – and cash in plane tickets for food and drive to meets instead, Morrow set himself on qualifying for Rome in 1960.



Morrow performed well back at Abiline Christian College, but when the Rome 1960 Olympic trials came around, Morrow was suffering a groin injury sustained during a warm up meet and couldn’t run in the trials. Still, there was a spot available as a reserve, and Morrow was invited to train in California with the squad. He arrived healthy in Los Angeles, and promptly began to beat athletes who had made the team.



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“When it’s time to go to the Olympics, I kept calling the night before, and they said no we haven’t made up our minds, we haven’t decided yet, you know, we don’t know yet, we’re still meeting,” Morrow recalled.” They said you just meet us at the airplane at LAX, and we will tell you if you’re going or not. So I met them out there and they said no. You’re not going. I don’t know why they didn’t take me in ‘60.”



Morrow may have been left on the runway because the US had a healthy Sime on their roster. The Duke star had beaten Morrow before and held world records. They also had Ray Norton, who was favored to duplicate Morrow’s feat of winning three gold medals.

Then again, Morrow, still very much in his prime with three Olympic gold medals in his pocket, had testified at a US Senate hearing that there were too many freeloaders at the 1956 Olympic Games, statements that did not sit well with the all-powerful Brundage.

In Rome, Sime finished second in the 100m to West German Armin Harry, before the 4x100m team flopped after being disqualified after Frank Budd handed off to Norton out of his zone. Back home, Morrow felt humiliated by the way he was treated and that, added to his anger with the way amateur athletes were treated, fueled his decision to retire from the track.

In 1961, Morrow began a campaign to reverse the paltry stipend US athletes were forced to live on while higher ups enjoyed all the trimmings of high profile sports executives. He appealed for, and received an audience with Bobby Kennedy where he was able to air his gripes. Then he was invited to speak at a US Senate hearing for a second time, one that yielded little to no change.



A bitter Morrow felt his being shunned by the US track and field community came as a result of his attempts to bring change. He further retreated from public life, leaving Houston where he was training to be a stock broker before returning to the San Benito Valley where he’s spent most of his time since.



Despite his achievements on the track – and his campaigns for better treatment off it, Morrow remains a champion lost to history.

“I don’t get mentioned,” said Morrow. “I get left out a lot. And I think that’s because I was fighting them so much ... that may be a part of it. I don’t know.”