Two Friends, 10 Events : Johnson Outlasted Yang 30 Years Ago in Olympic Decathlon

Accompanied by thunder and lightning, two athletes completed a two-day struggle for a gold medal that is as well remembered for the athletes’ unique relationship as it is for their magnificent struggle.

It was the decathlon at the Rome Olympics, Sept. 5-6, 1960. Thirty years ago today.

Two athletes, two countries . . . but the same university, the same coach.

Rafer Johnson, a UCLA graduate, was the heavy favorite. He was 25 and just off a world record-breaking performance at the U.S. Olympic trials at Eugene, Ore., where he’d broken the world record before the end of the ninth event.

Yang Chuan-Kwang, called C.K. by most people, was a 27-year-old UCLA freshman from Taiwan who had trained for two years almost daily with Johnson and under UCLA track coach Elvin “Ducky” Drake.

When it all came down to two stormy, summer days in Rome, Johnson was the winner because he wouldn’t fold in the stretch of the final event, the 1,500 meters. Yang lost, he says today, because he wound up in the wrong 1,500 meter heat--with Johnson.

The day Johnson won his final decathlon--he never competed again--was arguably one of track and field’s most memorable days. On the same day Johnson and Yang were waging the final hours of their decathlon, Herb Elliott of Australia ran away from a great 1,500-meter field and set a world record, 3:35.6, that would last for seven years. And Otis Davis of Los Angeles, in a photo finish, won the 400-meter final in 44.9, another world record.

But seldom had two athletes, tethered so tightly to each other’s aspirations as these two, competed so fiercely on such a stage. Some historians went back to the 1924 Paris Olympics for a comparison, when boxers Joe Salas and Jackie Fields, representing not only the United States but the Los Angeles Athletic Club as well, wound up in the gold medal bout at featherweight.

Rafer Johnson came to UCLA from Kingsburg, Calif., a San Joaquin Valley town where his father, Lewis Johnson, found work as a railroad section hand, at a peach cannery and in an animal food processing plant.

At the age of 14, Johnson watched another San Joaquin Valley Olympic decathlon champion, Bob Mathias, win a decathlon at nearby Tulare. Studying the competition, Johnson figured he could beat half the athletes in the field and he hadn’t even gone out for track at Kingsburg High yet.

He won a decathlon as a high school senior while being recruited by virtually every football coach on the West Coast. None of them won. Ducky Drake, the UCLA track coach, did.

“I just had a great rapport with Coach Drake, and wanted to compete for him,” Johnson says today. “I wanted to play football, too, and Red Sanders and I talked a lot about it. But I just couldn’t fit it in. In 1955 it was the Pan American Games, in 1956 it was the Melbourne Olympics . . . “

Yang was a teen phenom in Taiwan. A member of the Takasago ethnic group, which inhabited the island of Taiwan for centuries before the Chinese arrived, Yang caught the eye of several officials of the Taiwan national track and field federation, who raised funds and sent him to the U.S. to train.

He spent more than a year in UCLA extension classes, mastering English, before enrolling as a freshman in 1958.

Suddenly, Drake had the world’s two best decathlon performers on his track, every day. Drake, who died at 85 in 1988, was a UCLA institution. When he enrolled at UCLA as a freshman in the 1920s, the campus was on Vermont Ave., six years before the move to Westwood.

When he coached, he coached them together. When they competed, he coached them separately, from the first row of the stands. Sportswriters covering the 1960 Games were fascinated at watching first Johnson visiting privately with Drake, exchanging whispers, Yang waiting patiently a few yards away, for his turn.

“Before the 1,500 at Rome,” Johnson said recently, “Ducky told me: ‘You’ve got to run the race of your life, Rafe, because C.K. is going to run the race of his life.’ He handled that situation wonderfully. To this day, neither C.K. nor I know which one of us he favored, if he did. That’s why we’ve stayed so close all these years.”

Johnson came to Rome in 1960 as the decathlon’s premier performer. Track and Field News called his 8,683-point performance in the trials “staggering.” With a 233-foot, 3-inch javelin throw, his first throw in the ninth event, he broke the world record of the Soviet Union’s Vasily Kuznetzov (who would finish third in Rome). His final total surpassed Kuznetzov’s by 326 points.

Few noticed, however, that Yang, too, broke the old world record, by 69 points.

Today, Johnson, 55, is the volunteer president of California Special Olympics, funded by the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation. He has two salaried jobs, as spokesman for the Hershey Track and Field Program and for Reebok USA.

He competed at 210 to 215 pounds but today, playing lots of racquetball and tennis, he’s a lean 190. He lives in Sherman Oaks with his wife, Elizabeth, and children Jennifer, 17, and Joshua, 15. He was selected to light the Olympic flame at the Coliseum to open the 1984 Games.

Yang, 57, lives in both Kao Hsiung, Taiwan, where he is executive director and head coach of the country’s track and field training center, and Thousand Oaks. His wife, Daisy, whom he met at UCLA, lives at the family home in Thousand Oaks. The Yangs have two sons, C.K., Jr., 26, and Cedric, 30.

Yang lives in Thousand Oaks for months at a time, following major Asian and other international competitions.

Johnson never competed in sports again. Although he’d never played college football, the Rams chose him in the NFL draft, as a defensive back. The Rams offered him a $10,000 contract, big money then, and he declined.

Yang not only continued as a decathlete, he put the world record nearly out of sight in 1963, with a 9,131-point performance. Yang’s mastery of the fiberglass vaulting pole (he briefly held the world vault record at 16-3 1/2) was one reason the decathlon scoring tables were revised.

Rome would prove his best chance at an Olympic gold medal. He was eighth at the 1956 Olympics, second in Rome and fifth in 1964.

Both recently discussed their 1960 Rome memories, Johnson in an interview at his Santa Monica Special Olympics office, Yang by phone from Taiwan.

RAFER JOHNSON

“I can’t believe it’s been 30 years. I told my wife the other day the 30-year mark was coming up soon, and she couldn’t believe it either. I think about Rome so much, I forget how long ago it really was.

“My goal in those days, competing against C.K., was to try to keep him from annihilating me in his two best events, the vault and the 1,500, and then I would try to annihilate him in my two best events and his two worst events, the shot and discus.

“If all other things were roughly equal, I’d win. But they seldom are in the decathlon, so we were always pretty close to each other. In Rome, when the second day started, the first event was the 110-meter hurdles and I ran an awful race. I hit the second hurdle very hard and didn’t recover. It was the worst hurdles race of my career.

“I always figured if I had a good hurdle race, I would win any decathlon. Now, I had a 55-point lead over C.K. after the first day, but blew it all with that horrible hurdles (Johnson ran 15.3, Yang 14.6. Johnson’s lifetime best was 13.8) I needed something extra.

“Really, at no time was I confident of winning in Rome. In 1956, I was the world record holder in Melbourne, and Milt Campbell came along, had two fantastic days, and beat me.

“On the first day, C.K. had had a bad shotput, which he almost always did. The worst rainfall was on the first day, and he fouled a couple of times and had trouble gripping the wet shot. So I buried him pretty good (51-10 3/4 to 43-8 3/8) there, but that was before my hurdles race.

“I’ve thought of that hurdles race, the first event on the second day, many times. I didn’t warm up properly. With the storms the day before, there were long delays. I didn’t get back to the village until something like 2 a.m. I was wiped out.

“So when we lined up for the hurdles, I’m thinking in the back of my mind: ‘Conserve energy.’ It was the worst thing I could do, the worst kind of attitude. Afterward, I went over and talked to Ducky and he told me: ‘Keep your head up. This is like life, one event at a time. Forget about it and get on with it.’

“I buried C.K. in the next event, the discus (159-1 to 130-8 1/2) and got some of it back, but I was still depressed over the hurdles.

“C.K.’s best event, the vault, was coming up and I knew if I had another poor effort there--it was a weak event for me--I might not catch him in the 1,500. The javelin followed the vault, but we were fairly close there.

“Well, I got my career best in the vault, 13-5 3/8 (Yang did 14-1 1/4), and for the first time I felt OK.

“In the 1,500, we both wound up in the same heat, which was very good for me. I needed to stay within 10 seconds of C.K. to win it, and I planned to stick to him like a buddy in combat. I had one other advantage, and I don’t think C.K. knew this at the time--this was my last decathlon. I was prepared to run as fast as I had to in this last race of my life.”

And he did. In the cool night air, before 50,000 in the Olympic Stadium, Johnson stayed two strides behind Yang, who tried but failed to pull away with two separate sprints over the final 300 meters.

At the finish, they collapsed into each other’s arms.

Talking of the 1,500, Yang said: “I knew he would never let go of me unless he collapsed. I knew he would win. He is that way.”

C.K. YANG

“Thirty years? It seems like only yesterday! I have films of some of the competition on video and I still watch them. It doesn’t seem so long ago when I look at the films.

“There were two turning points for me, the shotput and the 1,500.

“The rain was really bad, especially the first day. It rained hard for three hours, and when they started to dry the place up, the starting blocks for the 400 were under water. The shot was a terrible event for me and having to put a wet one made it even worse.

“My first put was a foul, then it started raining hard again. The shot was so slippery I had to concentrate on just getting off a fair put, let alone a good one. I was afraid I’d foul on every put if I wasn’t careful.

“You know, I took some Taiwan athletes to Rome for an international meet in 1987 and it rained hard then, too. It made me think of that day, of the trouble I had with the shot.

“I figured I had an outside chance to win after nine events . . . until I found out Rafe and I were in the same 1,500 heat. I knew he’d stay right with me, no matter how fast I ran. If we’d been in separate heats, I’d have won the gold medal, not Rafer.

“Rafe and I loved competing against each other. We needed each other, in a way. In one of the practices before the Games in Rome, Rafe’s pole broke during a vault and he somersaulted in the air and landed awkwardly, on his back.

“He was OK, but the first thing I thought was: ‘Oh, no--I don’t want to win this without Rafe in the competition!’

“It was a remarkable time for all three of us. Same school, same coach, different nations. It was a unique relationship, like a father and two sons. And not once did Ducky ever show favoritism to either of us.”