He Had Trouble Coming Down From Olympic Dream

It remains, 51 years later, one of the best California sports stories--the tale of how a 17-year-old from Tulare went to the Olympic Games and won the decathlon.

Especially considering that:

* Four months before the 1948 London Olympics, Bob Mathias had never seen a javelin.

* Two months before the Games, Mathias had not only never competed in a decathlon, he’d never competed in six of the 10 events.

In June 1948, he finally competed in his first decathlon, in the Pasadena Games at the Coliseum. He won, qualifying for the Olympic trials in New Jersey two weeks later.

He won there too. He was going to London. When he returned home to Tulare, he got a parade.

“When I got to London, I was very nervous because I was afraid I’d come in last,” recalled Mathias, in 1988.

He didn’t. He won, staggering across the finish line of the final event, the 1,500 meters.

Mathias became the youngest winner of a men’s track and field event in the Olympics. In the locker room afterward, the exhausted teenager was asked how he was going to celebrate his victory.

“I’ll start shaving, I guess,” he said.

This time when Mathias returned to Tulare, police had to clear jubilant people from the airfield so his plane could land. This time, it was a major celebration--a day of sirens and cherry bombs, bands . . . and a lot of cheering and tears.

Mathias went on to become a football star at Stanford, then he won the gold medal again in the decathlon in 1952 at Helsinki.

The late Paul Zimmerman, sports editor of The Times from 1939 to 1968, talked in 1988 of covering Mathias in London:

“I still consider Mathias in London the most exciting story I ever covered, certainly the biggest sports story I ever wrote.”

Also on this date: In 1986, three grand slams were hit in one game for the first time. Texas’ Toby Harrah hit the first, then Larry Sheets and Jim Dwyer each hit one in a nine-run Baltimore fourth inning. The Rangers won, 13-11. . . . In 1952, the St. Louis Browns’ Satchel Paige, 46, became the oldest pitcher to throw a complete game when he went 12 innings for a 1-0 victory over Detroit. . . . In 1926, Gertrude Ederle, 19, became the first woman to swim the English Channel.