1964 Olympics - Timing is Everything
Sensational performances in the first Tokyo Olympic Games miss receiving the full limelight due to timing of the news
INTRODUCTION from The Sports Time Traveler™
As a competitive track athlete for 40 years, I’ve always heard stories about some of the incredible performances at the 1964 Olympic track & field competition.
The 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo took place late in the year, from October 10 - 24, 1964. Since I began writing The Sports Time Traveler™ in 2022, I’ve been patiently waiting till we reached precisely 60 years since those Games to make the virtual trip back in time to experience it myself.
I’ve been back from the virtual trip for a couple of weeks, but I’m just now getting a chance to share my report.
There were 3 athletes whose stories caught my attention the most.
I was intrigued by the storylines around Wyomia Tyus in the 100 meter dash, and Bob Hayes in the 100 meter dash and 4 x 100 meter relay.
But the one athlete I became totally enamored with was distance runner Billy Mills, a Marine Corps transportation officer stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, who is half Sioux Indian.
I will start out with a brief report on Wyomia Tyus and Bob Hayes and then focus on Billy Mills.
Then in an additional report, I come back to Bob Hayes’ encore performance.
Note that for this virtual trip I stayed in America so I could experience the Tokyo Olympics from the home front as nearly all Americans would have in 1964.
Here is my report:
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1964
There have been some incredible performances in Tokyo the past few days at the Games of the XVIII Olympiad, which is the first ever Olympics to take place in Asia.
But they have received somewhat muted attention in America because several other news items have dominated media attention, and because the television coverage of these Olympic Games, during weekdays, has been limited to late night broadcasts on tape.
THE WORLD SERIES - Yankees vs. Cardinals
It’s a little sad that the Olympics are taking place in October when they must go head-to-head with the World Series.
And this year was no ordinary World Series. It went to a 7th game that was played yesterday afternoon.
It also featured the two franchises with more World Series victories than any other.
The Yankees made their 14th World Series appearance in the past 16 seasons. Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford were all playing for the Yankees, and Yogi Berra was managing the team.
Their opponents were the St. Louis Cardinals, making their first World Series appearance since they beat the Red Sox in 1946. But the Cardinals have won the Series 6 times prior to this season, the 2nd most of any franchise behind the Bronx Bombers.
Both teams finished the season on a tear.
The Yankees won 30 of their last 41 games.
In late August, the Cardinals were just a little above .500 at 65 - 58, and were 11 games back of the Phillies. Then they won 18 of their next 26 games. But the Cardinals were still 6.5 games back on September 20th. At that point the Cardinals stopped losing games and the Phillies suffered perhaps the all-time epic collapse.
The Phillies did not win another game in the month of September - they lost 10 straight..
The Cardinals won 9 of 10 and wrapped up the National League Pennant.
WORLD SERIES - Game 7
The World Series was a dramatic one.
The Cardinals took game 1. The Yankees stormed back to take a 2 games to 1 lead. And the Cardinals won game 4 to tie the series.
Then the Cardinals took the series lead on the back of a magnificent 10 inning performance by flame thrower Bob Gibson, who allowed no earned runs and struck out 13 Yankees in game 5.
The Yankees, now on the brink of elimination, came back to win game 6 thanks to back-to-back home runs by Maris and Mantle in the pivotal 6th inning to set up a game 7 in St. Louis.
In the final game, the Cardinals started Bob Gibson on just 2 days rest. Their batters forged a 6 - 0 lead and Gibson struck out 9 Yankees in pitching a complete game victory.
The Cardinals won the World Series behind Gibson’s heroic pitching. He struck out a record 31 batters in the 3 games he pitched to win the World Series MVP award.
The sports sections of all newspapers across America the past few days have featured headlines about the 6th and 7th games of the World Series.
Baseball is truly America’s pastime here in 1964.
Yesterday’s St. Louis Dispatch carried the story on page 3 of the celebration after the Cardinals were victorious in game 7.
But even that wasn’t the biggest news of the day in St. Louis.
Bigger World News Dominates Media Coverage
The front page of the St. Louis Dispatch carried the sobering news of the first atomic bomb set off by China:
And elsewhere even that news didn’t make the front page of other papers.
The New York Daily News this morning had an even more shocking headline on the sudden ouster of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, the man who had been in power since the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
The back page of the New York Daily News today exclusively covered game 7 of the World Series.
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
If all that isn’t enough to distract attention from the Olympics, we are in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In just a couple of weeks, on November 3rd, Americans will choose between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater for the next President of the United States.
It is amidst of all of this that gold medal races have been taking place daily on the track in Tokyo.
The Women’s 100 Meter Dash
Yesterday was the final in the women’s 100 meter dash.
4 years ago at the Rome Olympics, Wilma Rudolph won the hearts of Americans as the girl who overcame childhood polio to win 3 gold medals in the 100, 200 and 4 x 100 meter relay. Rudolph instantly became a household name in America.
Rudolph was a member of the Tennessee State University (TSU) track team coached by Ed Temple. Temple was a brilliant track coach who was also the head coach of the USA Women’s Track & Field team at the Rome Olympics.
This year Ed Temple is again the USA Women’s Track & Field head coach. And he has two more of his own TSU Tigerbelles’ sprinters that made it to Tokyo.
20 year old senior Edith McGuire is undefeated this year in the 100 meter dash. She is the favorite. She won the gold medal in the 100 meter dash in the Pan American games last year and also won the 100 meters in the USA - Soviet Union track meet.
McGuire’s teammate, 19 year old Wyomia Tyus, has also made the team in the 100. She won silver at the USA - Soviet meet this past June.
In the the first heat of the quarter-finals, Tyus sent shockwaves through the stadium as she set a new Olympic record and equaled the world record with a time of 11.2 seconds.
McGuire won the 3rd quarterfinal heat in a 11.4 seconds.
In the semi-finals Tyus again won the 1st heat, this time in 11.3 seconds. While McGuire qualified for the final in the second heat running 11.6 seconds.
You can experience the Olympic 100 meter final as I did by watching this YouTube video:
Tyus is the 3rd from the left and McGuire is 2nd from the left.
Tyus got a strong start and was clearly ahead of the field at 50 meters. She held on to win easily in 11.4 seconds with her TSU teammate McGuire finishing 2nd in 11.6.
It was a great victory for both Tyus and her coach Ed Temple. In the Sunday October 18, 1964 Tennessean newspaper, sportswriter Raymond Johnson quoted Temple saying, “Everybody thought Wilma’s victory was a fluke. Now we have proved that the Tigerbelles are good, they are the real thing.”
Sadly, due to the plethora of international news and the 7th game of the World Series, Tyus’ victory on October 16th was reduced to sparse mention in American newspapers.
The timing of Tyus’ big race was unfortunate.
The Men’s 100 Meter Dash
Two days ago was the final of the men’s 100 meter dash.
21 year old Bob Hayes of Jacksonville, Florida, came to Tokyo expected to win the gold medal and earn the unofficial title of “World’s Fastest Human.”
Hayes has never lost a race in the 100 meters or 100 yard dash. And 2 years ago he set the world record in the 100 yard dash.
But Hayes had a couple of problems coming into this Olympics. He had pulled a muscle in a track meet in June, which caused him to miss the first of the two Olympic trials track meets in the first week in July. He couldn’t race for another 2 months leading up to the second Olympic trials. However he not only won that trials, he ran 10.1 seconds, equaling the American record. Hayes appeared to be physically ready for Tokyo.
But Hayes had another problem. The Olympics were taking place during football season, and the 5th year senior at Florida A&M University was the star player on the Rattlers’ team. An unconfirmed rumor has it that coach Jake Gaither was not going to allow Hayes to miss games to go to the Olympics until President Johnson intervened to explain that America needed Hayes in Tokyo.
Bob Hayes is large for a sprinter at 6 feet and 190 pounds. He plays halfback and split end for the Florida A&M football team, and will join the team after the Olympics after missing the first 4 games of the season.
Jesse Owens, the winner of 4 gold medals including the 100 meters at the 1936 Olympics is attending these Olympic Games. He was interviewed about Hayes earlier this week by the AP and had this to say, “Hayes really fascinates me. I just don’t understand how a fellow that big can generate so much speed.”
In the semi-final Hayes showed just how much speed he could generate. He ran one of the great races in 100 meter dash history.
You can see it in this video:
Hayes, 3rd from the left, quite literally destroyed the field.
His time was 9.9 seconds, making him the first to ever run under 10 seconds for the 100 meters in any conditions.
The time however was wind aided and did not count, but it was still quite shocking.
A few hours later, Hayes was on the track again for the final. Jesse Owens was in the stands with sports columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times. Murray reported in the October 16th Los Angeles Times what Jesse prior to the final, “Hayes should win. To me he is like beautiful music, all notes perfectly in place. You can close your eyes and LISTEN to Bob Hayes run and you will know it’s Hayes.”
But in a possible twist of fate, Hayes drew the unenviable position of lane 1. This was particularly concerning because on the damp cinder track, which is like a dirt track, lane 1 was all chopped up by the 20 kilometer race walk from the prior day.
Despite the condition of lane 1, Hayes ran a race for the ages.
Unfortunately most Americans didn’t see it because NBC’s taped broadcast didn’t start until 11:30pm.
You can see it here on tape:
Hayes in lane 1, on the inside of the track, gets off to a fast start and pulls away from the field to win by an astonishing margin.
His time is officially 10.0 seconds and ties the world record.
NOTE from The Sports Time Traveler™
I interrupt this article to provide some additional information from 2024 about Hayes’ performance.
According to Wikipedia, Hayes time was recorded as 9.9 on several officials stopwatches. In addition, Dick Bank, the respected track & field authority, who came to these Tokyo Olympics as the track expert for NBC television, indicated in an interview in the November 25, 1964 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News that he also timed Hayes in 9.9. And unlike the semi-final, the wind was within the legal limit for a record.
But the brand new electronic timing system was in place in the Olympics for the first time, and a convoluted timing conversion used in this Olympic Games pegged his time at 10.0, equaling the world record.
Hayes may have been robbed of the first official sub-10 second 100 meters.
While 10 seconds was broken 4 years later in the Mexico City Olympics, that performance benefitted from the extreme altitude effect at 7,500 feet elevation.
The first time 10 seconds in the 100 meters was officially broken at sea level was not until Carl Lewis at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, running on a much faster synthetic track.
So much in life relies on good timing.
By the way, The Sports Time Traveler was at that race, in real life, at the L.A. Olympics in 1984.
Now back again to 1964.
The Men’s 10,000 Meter Run
3 days ago, 38 runners toed the line for the start of the 10,000 meter run, a race that required 25 laps around the 400 meter track at Tokyo Olympic Stadium.
The prohibitive favorite was Ron Clarke of Australia, the man who holds the world record in a time of 28:15.
Another man to watch was the defending gold medalist from the 1960 Rome Olympics, Pyotr Bolotnikov of the Soviet Union. He held the Olympic record time of 28:32.
One American, Gerry Lindgren, was considered to have an outside chance to win gold. He is just 18, is only 5’5” and 120 pounds, and has only run the 10,000 three times. But earlier this summer he destroyed two formidable Russians in the USA-Soviet Union dual meet. There is concern however that Lindgren will not be in top form since he twisted his ankle stepping in a hole on the practice track.
NOTE from The Sports Time Traveler™
I’m breaking into this article from 2024 to explain that in 1964 all tracks were cinder tracks, which resembled hard packed dirt. The cinder tracks could develop holes, get choppy and when it rained heavily the athletes would have to slog through the track.
While it is inconceivable to track athletes now, it is no surprise that Lindgren stepped in a hole on the heavily used practice track in 1964.
Now back once more to ‘64.
The two other Americans in the field are given no chance at all - Ron Larrieu and Billy Mills. Mills, who is half Sioux Indian, and serves as a Marine Corps transportation officer at Camp Pendleton in California, was so disregarded that not a single reporter conducted an interview with him prior to the race. An AP article that appeared in The New York Times wrote that Mills is a “1,000 to 1 shot.”
Mills has never broken 29 minutes for 10,000 meters. His best time is a minute slower than Clarke’s world record. Mills has never won an international race. His claim to fame before qualifying for the Olympic team was winning the Big Eight cross-country championship while attending the University of Kansas in 1960.
Mills had qualified at the trials by finishing a surprise 2nd to Gerry Lindgren on September 13th at the second Olympic trials at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Earlier in the summer, Mills had also qualified to run in the marathon with the pedestrian time of 2:27:29.
The 10,000 meter race was broadcast on tape after midnight on NBC Wednesday night. You can watch the race as some people who stayed up late at night did earlier this week. In this tape below you can see the final lap.
There are only 3 runners left in contention:
Ron Clarke of Australia - the favorite and the world record holder
Mohammed Gammoudi of Tunisia - winner of the 5,000 and 10,000 in last year’s Mediterranean Games, but otherwise an unknown at this level.
Billy Mills of the United States - a man who has never won an international competition, was not expected to contend, and whose best time was nearly a minute slower than Clarke’s. Halfway through the race Mills had run the fastest 3 miles of his life. And yet he managed to keep going and here he was right in contention with a lap to go.
Here’s my commentary on the race with the time stamps on the tape. It’s one of the greatest minutes of Olympic track & field I’ve ever seen:
0:00 - At the start of the final lap, Ron Clarke (#12) is in the lead on the inside in the white jersey. Billy Mills (#722), wearing the dark USA top, is on the outside just off Clarke’s right shoulder. Gammoudi (#615) is 2 strides behind, he has a tank top that’s white in front and dark in back. He’s easy to spot with his characteristic head bobbing motion.
All 3 of the contenders are having to deal with a drawn out string of lapped runners, who are taking up the inside lanes of the track, instead of moving outside to allow the leaders to have space. As someone who ran competitive track meets for 40 years, this was the first odd thing I noticed about this race.
As they enter the penultimate turn, Mills makes a stunning bid for the lead.
0:15 - Watch as Clarke shoves his elbow hard into Mills’ side in a bid to push Mills out so he can get around a lapped runner. This was oddity number 2. I’ve seen pushing and shoving in track races, but not a brash, full on display move by the prohibitive favorite that might result in a DQ. Mills, a big man for a distance runner, is knocked so hard by Clarke that he loses his balance and stumbles all the way out to the 3rd lane before nicely regaining his form.
0:18 - Just 3 seconds later, just as Mills has regained his form, Gammoudi unabashedly stiff arms both Clarke on his left and Mills on his right as he boldly creates a hole in between them to shoot through and take the lead himself. How Gammoudi thought this was a legal track move I can’t fathom. And how he wasn’t disqualified I don’t understand.
0:37 - The runners are now entering the final turn, and Gammoudi has opened up what seems like an insurmountable 10 yard lead following his gut punches to Clarke and Mills.
0:45 - Off the final turn, Clarke now puts on a brilliant drive and is close to catching Gammoudi.
0:49 - Into the top of the homestretch, Clarke has pulled up to Gammoudi’s shoulder. You can see Mills is at least 5 yards, perhaps 10 yards, behind, and appears to be out of the race. Clarke can see the finish line now, he can visualize the gold medal that he so desperately wants, and should rightfully be his given his dominance over the world at this distance on the track. But Clarke can’t quite pass Gammoudi who puts on a tiny surge to maintain the lead.
0:54 - NBC color analyst Dick Bank, who has been quiet on the broadcast over the entire last lap to this point, is suddenly overcome with emotion at this moment, and begins to manically scream, “Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” Mills is not yet on the TV screen, so we can’t see what has driven Bank beserk.
0:56 - Now on the left side of the screen, with perhaps 40 meters to go, appears Mills with enormous loping strides, he’s gaining shockingly large swaths of track on the leaders with each step. NBC announcer Bud Palmer more serenely shouts, “He’s coming on. Mills is coming on.”
0:58 - Dick Bank lets out a wild laugh like he has gone completely looney. He is mesmerized by Mills’ astonishing kick. Mills, who has caught the adrenaline rush of the century, sweeps past the world record holder, Clarke, and breezes by the leader Gammoudi as though the Tunisian were standing still.
1:02 - Mills has run so fast that he has not only taken the lead, but he’s completely crossed the TV screen, from off screen left to off screen right, in just 4 seconds. The cameraman can’t pan to the right fast enough, and Mills is gone out of view before we can see him cross the finish line. Palmer says, “What a tremendous surprise here. Bill Mills of the United States win the 10,000 meters!”
1:04 - The TV screen switches to a new camera angle and we see Mills, arms raised, well past the finish.
Billy Mills has won the 10,000 meter run with a kick that can genuinely be described as other worldly.
NOTE from The Sports Time Traveler™
As a distance runner, the final kick of Billy Mills to win the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Olympics is one of the most inspiring moments in Olympic history to me.
But I’m breaking into this article again from 2024 for a more important reason. I need to let you know that following the 10,000 meter race, NBC fired Dick Bank for his excited on air outburst as Mills stormed from 10 yards back in the final 100 to blow by the leaders, including the world recordholder, to win the gold medal, the first ever in this event by an American.
I personally think it was one of the great calls in sports history.
In 2020, when Dick Bank died at age 90, Beth Harris of the AP wrote an article that appeared in newspapers across the country including the Boston Globe. A friend of Dick’s explained what happened during the call of 10,000 meter final in the 1964 Olympics, “When he saw Mills coming on and Bud Palmer (the lead announcer) didn’t mention Mills’ name he just let it burst out… Bud Palmer was never bitter about it. He thanked Dick for saying something.”
Now let’s return again 1964.
Newspapers in America carried the story over the next several days, but few gave Mills a headline in the sports section.
In the most extensive version of the AP article, Mills was quoted saying, “I knew I had a chance if could carry on to the finish… a few days ago I even sprinted 220 yards in 23.8 and that made me hope for the best.”
Mills had a secret weapon, the potential to finish with a burst of pure speed.
Mills also described the bumping on the last lap. Remarkably he didn’t believe he had been a victim, he even felt getting bumped was too his advantage, “It didn’t do any harm. Actually, I was glad to get on the outside because it hadn’t been chewed up so much and the track was more firm.”
As the runners were in the last turn, Mills explained that he took the time to gather his energy for a final kick, “I did drop back a little about 100 yards out, just to take a rest so I’d have a kick when I needed it.”
As a long time track runner, I found this strategy to be astonishing. I had never heard of someone taking a rest with 100 yards to go in a race. But it worked!
Timing really is everything.
Mills had run a remarkable race, keeping pace with the world record holder for 25 laps. His time was nearly a minute faster than he had ever run for 10,000 meters previously.
While most American newspapers shunned Mills, providing only small mentions of his miraculous gold medal run, in track crazy Australia, where they had pinned their hopes on Ron Clarke, a picture of Billy Mills, arms raised in the air as he is about to break the tape, appeared near the very top of the front page of The Age, the leading Melbourne newspaper.
In the article on the race, Ron Clarke explains what happened on the final lap when he shoved Mills, “A funny thing happened in the last lap in the back straight. I accidentally bumped Bill Mills and he went wide. I turned to apologise to him and suddenly Gamoudi went through like a bullet.”
So perhaps Clarke was not the villain he appeared to be the first time I watched the tape.
Timing also cost Clarke the race. In the same Melbourne, Australia article above, Clarke described how he made a fatal mistake as he was, “thinking I had it won with 5 laps to go.”
Clarke had set a blistering pace right from the start and kept it up for most of the race. Here’s what he told Greg Taylor of The Age in a back page article that appeared under a headline, “ONE MISTAKE COST CLARKE MEDAL WIN - 10,000m Shock”:
Clarke was further stunned when in the home stretch Gamoudi, and then Mills, pulled away from him. “I still didn’t realise I was going to lose until a few yards from home.”
Clarke didn’t just lose, the world record holder finished 3rd. Clarke could run unbelievable, world record times, but he didn’t have a strong finishing kick. He needed to keep pushing the pace with 5 laps to go to win.
The timing of Clarke’s final drive in the last lap was too late to shake off Gamoudi, and ultimately Mills who had superior sprinting speed.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1964
Yesterday was the final day of the track & field competition at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The biggest news of the day was in the men’s marathon and the men’s 4 x 100 meter relay.
THE MARATHON
Ethiopian Abebe Bikila became the first man to ever repeat as gold medalist in the marathon. This time he wore shoes (he famously won the marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympics running barefoot). His time of 2 hours, 12 minutes and 11 seconds set a new world record by over a minute and a half. And he won the race by over 4 minutes, an astonishing margin.
The AP article on the marathon, which was relegated to the inner pages of most sports sections in American newspapers noted that, “(Bikila) wasn’t even breathing hard,” when he finished. After he broke the tape, “he ran over to the infield grass and flopped on his back and did some bicycle-like exercises with his legs in the air.”
In 9th place, 8 minutes back, was Ron Clarke of Australia, the 10,000 meter world record holder and bronze medalist a week ago in the Olympic 10,000.
And in 14th place, 10 minutes behind Bikila, was Billy Mills. There were almost no mentions of Mills’ marathon performance in American newspapers beyond just his place and time.
THE 4 x 100 METER RELAY
Bob Hayes was back on the cinders on the final day of track & field for the 4 x 100 relay.
You can watch the race as I did on tape at this link:
At the 34 second mark on the video, Hayes gets the baton in about 6th place at least 3 yards behind the lead. He is wearing the dark jersey on the left side of the screen.
In an AP article that appeared in the Miami News, Hayes said, “I just gave it all I had. I wanted that one. I wanted it bad.”
Hayes didn’t just give it all he had.
He gave it all more than anyone ever had.
Hayes stormed from behind to win the gold medal for the USA in a new world record time of 39.0 seconds.
Today’s Oakland Tribune had an article about the race that was written by Jesse Owens. He started with this, “Bob hayes runs like a freight train barreling downhill with the air brakes off.”
Later in the article Owens wrote as though he were in awe of the man who now holds the title that Jesse Owens once unequivocally held - World’s Fastest Human. Owens described Hayes anchor leg dash, “Bob, the big bull from Florida took the baton at least three strides behind, but in five or six powerful kicks you knew he’d blow them off the track. He pulled away as if it were fore-ordained, inevitable. It was a fantastic display of power, and that is the essence of Bob Hayes.”
POSTSCRIPT From The Sports Time Traveler -
Final Note about Wyomia Tyus
In late November, 1964, Wyomia Tyus was welcomed in her hometown of Griffin, Georgia with a parade.
This AP article, that appeared in the Atlanta Journal, described the homecoming:
Outside of Georgia, there were scant mentions of Wyomia Tyus, the world’s fastest woman, in the American media in the remainder of 1964.
Wyomia Tyus continued to compete at a high level in track & field after 1964 however, and The Sports Time Traveler will continue to follow Wyomia Tyus in 1965 and beyond as I continue my personal journey to follow sports from precisely 60 years ago.
Final Note about Bob Hayes
In mid-November, 1964, an article appeared in the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News in which Dick Bank, the man who had been fired by NBC after his excited screams at the finish of the 10,000 meter run, asserted that he timed Bob Hayes final leg of the 4 x 100 in 8.6 seconds. While there are no official statistics maintained on final legs of a 4 x 100, if it is true that Hayes ran that fast it would rank as the fastest ever anchor leg in a 4 x 100, even faster than current 100 meter world record holder Usain Bolt. Bolt ran what is considered, based on electronic timing, to be the fastest ever anchor leg when he ran 8.65 at the 2015 IAAF World Relays.
Regardless of Bank’s assertion of Hayes’ time, there is little dispute that Hayes ran at least as fast as 8.7 seconds for the final 100 meters in the 4 x 100 in Tokyo in 1964. And that was on a cinder track. There is not dispute that the cinder track in Tokyo was not anywhere close to as fast a surface as the mondo track that Bolt ran on in Nassau in the Bahamas in 2015.
The final 100 by Bob Hayes in the 1964 Olympics 4 x 100 is possibly the greatest 100 ever run.
After the Olympics, Bob Hayes returned to Florida A&M University where he was the starting halfback on the football team. He had a stellar half season.
On November 28th, Hayes led Florida A&M to a 24 - 14 victory over Texas Southern in the Gator Bowl in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. Hayes wowed his hometown crowd scoring all 3 touchdowns for Florida A&M including a 43 yard TD reception and a 58 yard TD run. The win helped Texas A&M win their final game of the regular season to finish with an 8 - 1 record.
The following week on December 5th, Florida A&M played Grambling in the championship of college football for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The game, called the Orange Blossom Classic, was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, and Hayes helped Florida A&M to a 42 - 15 victory. He scored three times, twice on 2 point conversion runs and once on a 48 yard TD reception.
2 days later, on Monday December 7th, Bob Hayes flew to Dallas, where he signed a 3 year deal with the Dallas Cowboys to play starting in the 1965 NFL season. On December 9th, Cowboys head coach Tom Landry, who had yet to see Hayes actually playing football, was quoted in an AP article saying, “He is a great athlete and he should fit into our plans admirably.”
By signing the Cowboys contract, Hayes, a 5th year senior at Florida A&M, gave up his eligibility for the 1965 college spring track season.
And thus ended, the college & Olympic Track career of the World’s Fastest Human.
But he was not yet done playing college football. On Christmas Day 1964, Bob Hayes, played in the North-South Shrine game, a college football all-star game in the Orange Bowl in Miami.
When he stepped on the field that day, Bob Hayes became the first African-American to ever to play in the annual North-South game that had a history going back to 1930.
Playing for the South team, early in the 4th quarter, quarterback Roger Staubach handed off to Hayes and he raced 39 yards for a touchdown. When Staubach completed the 2 point conversion it pulled the South team to within 8 points at 30 - 22.
Staubach then led a touchdown drive in which he plunged in from the 1 yard line with just over 2 minutes to go in the game. Another 2 point conversion pass by Staubach tied the game at 30.
The North’s quarterback, John Huarte of Notre Dame, then drove the North downfield where Huarte connected with Jack Snow on a 5 yard TD pass to win the game with 5 seconds remaining.
But in the loss, Hayes excelled as a split end, both receiving passes and hand offs from Staubach, as well as returning punts. For his performance, Bob Hayes received the honor as the South’s outstanding player.
The Sports Time Traveler will continue to follow Bob Hayes when he suits up for the Dallas Cowboys in 1965.
Final Note about Billy Mills
After the Olympics, Mills received little media attention in newspapers.
But Mills did receive a full page in LIFE magazine’s October 23, 1964 issue which you can see at this link:
October 23, 1964 LIFE magazine - flip to page 110
In early December, a few newspapers noted that Mills had received the AAU’s Bendetto Award for the United State’s best single performance of the year.
In 1965, Mills proved his 10,000 meter race in Tokyo was not a fluke when he set the world record for the 6 mile run in 27:11 in the AAU National Championship. An interesting note about this race is that Mills officially was tied with Gerry Lindgren for first place and they shared the world record.
Even more interesting is that Mills’ and Lindgren’s time of 27:11 for the 6 mile run converts to a 28:13 for 10,000 meters, which would have been 2 seconds faster than Ron Clarke’s world record 10,000 meter time of 28:15.
Nearly 20 years after Billy Mills astonishing gold medal victory in the 1964 10,000 meter run, he was the subject of a major motion picture starring heart throb Robbie Benson playing the part of Mills.
The movie was called, “Running Brave,” and debuted in November, 1983, to little fanfare. It was re-released by Disney in the spring of 1984, but never achieved box office success.
Billy Mills consulted on the development of the film and approved the selection of Robbie Benson to play the him.
The movie came out at a time when the Olympics were at a low point, as the debacle over the USA’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics was being followed up by the Soviet Union’s announced boycott of the upcoming 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. But the L.A. Olympics turned out to be a huge success sparking renewed interest in the Olympics.
Running Brave has received high ratings from critics and fans that have watched the movie.
Perhaps if it had been initially released after the 1984 Olympics it might have been a financial success.
Timing really is everything.
By the way, you can watch Running Brave for FREE on YouTube. Simply type in “Running Brave” in a YouTube search.
Thanks for reading.