The Lost Olympian : The Glory Was Swift and the Decline Slow for Rodney Milburn

The man at the homeless shelter in Baton Rouge, La., was sympathetic, but firm. Sorry, he told the shift worker who had just moved in. You can’t stay here when you work nights.

Rodney Milburn accepted his latest rejection the way he accepted his medals when he was famous - quietly and without a fuss.

He thanked them for two nights of hospitality. Then, as he had done so many times, he packed his bag and moved on.

Only later did his companions at the Bishop Ott shelter learn that the gentle smiling man who talked of coaching kids and getting close to God was an Olympic champion.

Only then did they discover that the paper plant worker who sold his blood for cab fare to work had won a gold medal in 1972, that he had skimmed the hurdles sleek as a gazelle, that for five glorious years he had been one of the fastest men in the world.

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People always learned about Rodney Milburn later--after he moved on.

Now the world was learning again, after his badly disfigured body was found at the bottom of a tank of scalding chemicals at the plant where he worked.

It wasn’t suicide, the coroner said. Like so many other twists in the life of the 47-year-old Olympian, it was just bad luck.

In a packed church, his family read a letter from President Clinton along with tributes from around the world. But between the lines, above the hymns, rose a question that lingered long after the president’s message: how could a gold medalist have fallen so far?

How could the country have forgotten this lost Olympian?

“A track man is like a flower, you have to bloom again every spring,” Milburn told an interviewer after winning the gold. “I’ve got to go to work and do it all over again.”

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As hard as he tried, Milburn never did do it all again--not on the Olympic track, not in his personal life. The roar of the crowd died quickly for the shy, slender man from Opelousas, La.

For all his globetrotting, Milburn never strayed far from the dusty one-way streets of home, an old trading town in the heart of Cajun country, about 30 miles west of Baton Rouge. He grew up in a four-room house in the projects, the youngest of seven children, a quiet kid with a big smile who loved chasing horses with his cousins in the country.

At J.S. Clark, the all-black high school, the coach would place dimes on the hurdles to see if Milburn would knock them off.

He never did. When he wasn’t winning, he was training, flying over handmade wooden hurdles on a strip of grass by the football field. He would push-mow the grass for hours.

The strip is still there, the only reminder of the school’s most famous graduate. Southern University, where Milburn headed after leaving Clark, also has no memorial.

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Milburn probably wouldn’t have cared, and if he did, he wouldn’t have told anyone. The trophies never mattered; he gave them away. The glory didn’t matter either.

“What matters,” he told his children, “is not what the world sees, but what God sees in your heart.”

So it didn’t bother him that a bunch of medals wound up in a Mississippi flea market. His family is still searching for his gold.

Sportswriters dubbed the Munich Games the “haunted Olympics” after 11 Israeli athletes were killed in a terrorist attack. Milburn, who stumbled in the trials and nearly didn’t make it onto the team, blocked out the tension and the athletes’ talk of going home. The games were sacred, Milburn said later, and he felt destined to win. He was already a national track hero, named athlete of the year by Track and Field News in 1971.

“The only thing we saw of Milburn was his back,” quipped hurdler Thomas Hill, who won the bronze in Munich.

“Everyone else sprinted and jumped,” said Willie Davenport, a five-time Olympian who finished fourth, after Hill. “Rod floated over the hurdles like poetry in motion.”

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Those were golden years of rivalry and friendship built purely on love for the sport. In the era before multimillion-dollar endorsements and celebrity sponsors, the best athletes in the world stepped off the winning box with the national anthem still ringing in their ears and nowhere to go but home.

Davenport, Hill and Milburn battled for records, not dollars. They tried new techniques, Milburn perfecting a jump with his two arms forward that eventually was copied worldwide. They set records. Milburn, already the world record-holder in the 110-meter hurdles, equaled an Olympic record at Munich, one that would remain for five more years.

“The sensation was unreal, nothing like it,” he said of hitting the tape on the Munich track. “I knew I would probably never feel like that again.”

He never did. The Olympic champion flew back to Baton Rouge with such little fanfare that he wandered around Southern University for a few days before anyone noticed he was back. The campus minister finally called the governor’s office.

“We have a national treasure here,” he said. “We should honor him.”

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So they threw a big parade and declared a state holiday and gave him a key to the city. Milburn was 22 and on top of the world.

But the world didn’t have much to offer a national treasure with a gold medal and a degree in physical education. And Milburn didn’t have the kind of personality to turn athletic glory into financial reward.

“What good was the key to the city,” said his wife, Betty, “when it didn’t open a single door?”

Davenport and Hill carved out careers in the military, which was thrilled to showcase its Olympians.

Milburn was never so fortunate. He tried to launch a coaching clinic but that didn’t work out. He tried professional football but didn’t make the cut. He joined the newly organized professional track circuit, giving up his amateur status. It folded after two years,but left him tagged as a professional, and therefore ineligible for the 1976 Olympics.

He didn’t qualify for the 1980 Olympics, and by the time the 1984 games rolled around, there were faster hurdlers on the track and Milburn’s record-breaking days were over.

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By then he had married and divorced twice, and money was a constant problem.

“It seemed like he was always reaching for bigger in life and always grabbing smaller,” said his older brother, Clary. “He never got the recognition he deserved.”

Not even at Southern. Hurdlers flocked to the university track to train with the Opelousas legend. But Milburn’s dream job lasted only three years. He was fired as coach in 1987 when the university named a new athletic director, who wanted his own staff.

At a rambling news conference afterward, Milburn seemed more dazed than hurt. He had done his best, he said. He had no regrets.

But the proud, private Olympian was never the same.

“He didn’t talk about it much, but he never got over it,” said his cousin, Jonah Milburn. “He didn’t want people to know how he felt. I guess he thought the less they knew, the more they would respect him as the great Rodney Milburn.”

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Eventually his firing became part of the burden of being the great Rodney Milburn, gold medalist, forgotten Olympian, pulp operator at a paper plant.

As much as he felt the track had failed him, Milburn couldn’t stay away. For the nine years he worked at the Georgia Pacific paper company in Baton Rouge, he still wandered into Southern to talk to coaches and athletes. He gave coaching clinics whenever he was asked, often paying his own way. He went to high school track meets around the state.

Impeccably dressed, confident, smiling, Milburn gave no hint his life was unraveling.

“He told me he was loving life, loving his job,” said champion hurdler Charles Foster, who met Milburn at a ceremony to honor Olympians a year ago. “He looked so good, I thought he was president of the company.”

In reality, Milburn was working 12-hour overnight shifts monitoring tanks in the bleach department for $14 an hour. He talked all the time of getting out, of starting over in sports.

But the company loved having an Olympian on the payroll. Its promotional literature shows Milburn beaming in his hard hat as he recites the company line: “If you become satisfied with where you are, you don’t gain anything. Others pass you by.”

Jonah Milburn believes her famous cousin was used by God as an example of how little fame and glory matter. They talked about it sometimes over dinner, how all the medals in the world can’t protect you from having the water turned off when you can’t pay the bills.

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Milburn spent the last few months with Jonah and her children in Baton Rouge, moving into their apartment when he could no longer pay for his own.

After years of living above his means, and borrowing from family and friends, he had lost much of what mattered. His third wife, Betty, had left with their two young children and started divorce proceedings. His beloved eldest son--the 23-year-old who carried his name--was in prison for armed robbery. Child support and back taxes slashed his last paycheck to $36.

Still, Milburn talked of a comeback, of starting his own coaching clinic, or going into business with his sister, Maryann. The homeless shelter was “transitional,” he told her when she begged him to move in with family. She could lend him money to get him back on his feet.

“Nah, nah,” he replied. “I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.”

On the last day of his life, after the shelter closed its doors, Milburn went to where he knew he wouldn’t be a burden. In church he hugged or shook hands with nearly everyone in the congregation.

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He didn’t know where he would spend the night--maybe with the guy he met when he went to sell his blood. Maybe he would sleep at the plant.

“His last words were, ‘just pray for me,”’ said cousin Jonah. “‘Right now this is between me and the Lord. No one else can help me.”’

His supervisor found his body later that night, floating in a 90-foot railroad car of scalding bleach solution, his hard hat bobbing by his side. Milburn had slipped through a manhole when he was checking the levels with a flashlight.

His death was ruled an accident. The Olympian who lost his foothold hadn’t stood a chance.

Of all the questions that swirled around Milburn’s life and death, one of the most puzzling is what happened to his medals and trophies. Louis Esskew bought some of them in a foreclosure sale a year ago for his thrift shop, which he later closed. Dozens more are stored in his Woodville, Miss., home, along with Milburn’s passport, photographs and postcards from Europe.

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Milburn’s family has offered to pay for the collection. Esskew, who had been in touch with Milburn about the belongings, now says he’ll sell them to the highest bidder.

Why shouldn’t he make a profit now that the athlete is dead? Esskew argues. “No one cared when he was alive.”

But the world is starting to care now that Milburn has passed on. There’s talk of memorials and foundations and track meets in his name, of a marble tomb with a sign that tells the world about the national treasure from Opelousas.

There’s talk of doing more to honor veteran Olympians in life, to drape their coffins in the Olympic flag in death.

“Other countries revere their track heroes. In Jamaica and Kenya and Cuba, they become ambassadors for their countries,” said LeRoy Walker, president emeritus of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “Yet this is how our track stars end up?”

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At the funeral Davenport and Hill stood by the rose-covered casket of their teammate and wept for the gentle man who was their friend, the athlete who could float over hurdles faster than anyone in the world, the lost Olympian.

They buried him under the pecan trees in the family plot by the bayou, where he once chased horses with his cousins. They said he ran so fast he could touch their tails.