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.