Light Touch

In the golden twilight of a summer’s afternoon 20 years ago, Rafer Johnson ignited the Olympic flame, signaling the onset of the Summer Games of 1984 in Los Angeles.

Even now, he says, anyone who saw it that afternoon at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum wants to touch him, tell him they saw it, explain how he proved that in a world full of problems dreams can still glow, hope can still burn.

Johnson, 69, especially remembers the moment just after he had sent the Olympic flame on its way to the caldron and turned to face the crowd below. “It was like I was in the middle of a hurricane and not even being touched by the wind,” he said.

In retrospect, Johnson would seem to have been the obvious choice. At the time, however, it was a secret closely held by a few, revealed only when Johnson emerged from the shadows of the Coliseum. He took the torch from Gina Hemphill, the granddaughter of another of America’s most famous Olympians, track and field star Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Johnson is one of America’s greatest Olympic champions, silver medalist in 1956 in Melbourne and gold medalist in 1960 in Rome in the decathlon. Later, he became known for his humanitarian work.

Johnson was born in Texas during the Depression to cotton pickers in a home that didn’t have electricity or running water. When he was 9, the family moved to the San Joaquin Valley town of Kingsburg.

At UCLA, he was elected student body president. He was the school’s first African American to pledge a national fraternity.

Still in college, he was named Sports Illustrated’s sportsman of the year for 1958. At a dinner at the University of Oklahoma chapter of Pi Lambda Phi, the magazine recounted, Johnson gave a speech exploring the uplifting values of competition.

“We make friends and I like to think that we leave as friends.... We go to exchange ideas, not to beat ideas into each other’s heads, like politicians,” he said. “It seems funny to say winning is not all-important -- I always want to win, and no one likes to lose. But when you start out on the field, everyone is equal. That is the important idea.”

In Rome, Johnson was the U.S. team’s flag bearer -- the first African American so honored.

After the 1960 Games, Johnson did some TV work. He did some acting. He recruited volunteers for the Peace Corps. He volunteered for Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, and on the night Kennedy was fatally shot in Los Angeles, it was Johnson who disarmed the gunman, Sirhan Sirhan.

In 1969, Johnson and other volunteers founded the Southern California chapter of Special Olympics. He has served it in various capacities for more than 30 years; for the last several years, he has been chairman of its board of governors.

“He is, without a doubt, in my estimation the most respected living American Olympian,” said Mike Moran, who for 25 years was spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Said NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw, who has known Johnson for more than 30 years: “He has just this innate dignity about him.”

In 1984, speculation swirled about who would be the final torchbearer. Would it be Mark Spitz, winner of seven gold medals in swimming in 1972? Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion? Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast, whose homeland defied the Soviet-led retaliatory boycott of Los Angeles?

Johnson had been discounted as a possibility. That spring he had taken part in the New York ceremony that launched the Olympic flame on its transcontinental journey and had run a leg of the relay in Dallas.

But the choice was Peter Ueberroth’s to make. And for five years, the president of the Los Angeles Olympic Committee said in a recent interview, Johnson had volunteered to do anything for the 1984 Games, proving himself time and again with his time and advice.

“He’s just quietly the real deal,” Ueberroth said.

Johnson had cast the deciding vote in the balloting that elected Ueberroth president of the organizing committee. But Ueberroth remains adamant that Johnson was not chosen as a quid pro quo.

“If anyone had been logically thinking, it is almost humorous to me -- it was kind of an easy choice for me,” he said.

About 10 days before the July 28 ceremony, after arriving at a senior citizens’ home in Studio City to give a speech, Johnson was told Ueberroth had to talk to him -- in person. By the time the speech was over, a car was waiting to take Johnson to Ueberroth’s office.

There, he was greeted by Ueberroth and David Wolper, the ceremony producer. Ueberroth said he wanted Johnson to light the caldron. Johnson recalled he was so stunned that all he could manage was, “Thank you.”

The job involved climbing 99 steps from the stadium floor, then turning around, facing the crowd and lighting the flame through a system of gas jets that would lead through the interlocking five-ring Olympic symbol up to the caldron atop the Coliseum.

“We had a college football player try it and he fell flat on his face,” Johnson recalled Wolper telling him. “But I know you can do it.”

Twenty-four years removed from his final athletic competition, Johnson was still working out regularly. But he decided he needed to start running stairs.

At one rehearsal, he cramped up and couldn’t make it to the top.

Another time he made it, except “it was shaky up there.” Everything seemed to be the same color, he said, and it was hard to run a straight line on the steps. “It was like blowing in the wind,” Johnson said.

He told Wolper about his concerns. One black dot was added to each step to help him stay centered. Two dots were painted onto the top rung. “When I got to that step, I knew to gather myself, slow down and turn around,” Johnson said.

Finally, at the top, on the platform itself, a three-foot pole was installed, giving him something to hold onto.

Johnson told only his wife, Betsy, along with his brothers and sisters and a few trusted friends. The day of the ceremony, while driving to the Coliseum, he told his children, Jenny and Josh.

Wolper hid Johnson in a trailer in a fenced-off area next to the Coliseum, where he changed into a pair of white shorts and a white singlet with the Olympic logo and sat down to watch the ceremony on TV.

During the parade of athletes, Johnson went to a Coliseum tunnel. There he waited.

He watched Hemphill run past. As she circled, all eyes on her, he made his way out to the track.

“It was real dark in that tunnel, and it was like going from night to day,” he said. “The whole world, it’s like you wake up and it was from a sleep to this beautiful daylight.”

When she extended the flame to him, few knew that he had broken a finger playing baseball the month before. It hurt to carry the four-pound torch.

“Everything was kind of blurry,” he said. “But I remember seeing the faces and one of them was [hurdler] Edwin Moses. All I could see were the faces of these athletes with these huge tears coming down their faces.”

Many of them had been denied the opportunity to go to the 1980 Games in Moscow by the U.S. boycott. That heightened emotions all around. For Johnson, his own memories of 1956 and 1960 came flooding back.

“I was emotional at the moment and seeing the tears on these athletes,” he recalled, “ ... all these memories came back and it was almost overwhelming.”

Johnson made his way to the peristyle end of the Coliseum and the stairs. Torch in his right hand, up he went -- concentrating on the dots.

“I was absolutely, totally calm and so focused on what I was doing that at that point not a single thought went through my mind other than to ... just put my foot down on that dot and continue up the stairs,” he said.

At the top, with his face being beamed around the world and ABC’s Jim McKay calling him a “great American,” Johnson turned around.

“The colors, the music were just totally spectacular in every sense of the word and more than you’d ever think it was,” he said. “The colors were more intense. The noise was more intense. The music was beautiful and inspiring. It was almost too much to take in. I actually thought I was going to have a heart attack.

“It wasn’t that I was physically tired. It was everything. The physical. The emotional. What my eyes were taking in. What my ears were absorbing. The total thing -- I thought this would be a good place to die, it was so beautiful.”

He raised the torch in the direction of the presidential box, then toward the athletes on the field, then toward the other side of the stadium, then returned to the center of the platform and lifted the torch to the gas jet attached to the bottom of the arch.

He heard a whoosh. The flame took and rose, through the rings, up to the caldron, which erupted in fire.

It was all he could do, Johnson said, to keep from crying.

In Montana, watching on television, Brokaw spilled tears of pride.

“I thought about the whole arc of his life. And how I’d always believed, well before I knew him personally, that he was the quintessential American athlete,” he said. “He was in the Olympic Games and he was a decathlete, and he had such ele- gance about him, such modesty. Whatever he did ... he always had this great dignity about him.”

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TODAY

* This is the 20th anniversary of the opening ceremony of the 1984 L.A. Games.

* Joan Benoit has the ecstasy, Gabriela Andersen-Scheiss the agony. D6

Upcoming

* Sunday: Carl Lewis earns four gold medals -- and hears boos.

* Aug. 8: Mary Slaney tangles with Zola Budd in the 3,000 and crumples to the track.