Giant on the Track

The Rev. Robert Richards was mildly apologetic for the stubble that darkened his unshaven face. "I always try to look rough on these days," he explained. But 5 o'clock shadow did not scare off his fans. The crowd on hand at Indiana's Wabash College for the National A.A.U. decathlon championship--the trials to determine U.S. Olympic contenders--dogged Bob Richards' every step.

Then the crowd deserted the defending champ and straggled across the rain-slowed track to watch a brown giant strip off his sweat suit. Rafer Lewis Johnson, 20, sophomore colossus (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.) from U.C.L.A., looked as good as the reports that preceded his arrival.

Fancy Routine. They may have been fickle, but the fans also were safe enough in their choice. For Rafe Johnson already held the world's record in the ten-event test that is an all-but-unrecognizable descendant of the pentathlon* of ancient Olympic times. In his home town of Kingsburg, Calif, last year, he ran up an astonishing total of 7,985 points, 98 more than Bob Mathias' winning Olympic performance in 1952, a fat 338 more than the best ever scored by his fast-improving prospective chief rival at Melbourne this fall, Russia's Vasiliy Kuznetsov.

Too sharp a competitor to underrate his own talents or misjudge a rival, Johnson began pointing for the 1956 contest back in 1952, when as a 16-year-old high-school sophomore he went to Tulare, Calif., to see Bob Mathias earn a trip to his second Olympics. The complicated scoring was beyond young Rafe (as it is beyond almost everyone else but the judges), but he was not too modest to decide that he was as good as or better than most of the entrants.

Rafe went home to Kingsburg, tuned up by going out for every sport he could. He worked out no special training routine for the demanding decathlon, simply determined to spend four hours a day practicing whichever event suited his or his coach's fancy, a routine he still follows.

High Hopes. Already qualified as an Olympic broad-jumper, Johnson paced himself nicely through the decathlon, made it all look so easy that fans could almost believe him when he insisted that in regular meets, he often works far harder. He started out by winning the 100-meter dash. He won the broad jump, placed third in the shot put, dropped to ninth in the high jump, with an injured knee, but tied for first (with Notre Dame's Aubrey Lewis) in the 400-meter run, toughest of the first day's tests.

Next afternoon Johnson took a third in the hurdles. Then, in the process of taking first place in the discus throw, he reinjured his left knee. Even so, he placed second in the pole vault, third in the javelin throw. But he dropped far back in the grinding 1,500-meter run. Though he had failed to break his own world's record, Johnson's final total of 7,754 points made him an easy first. Behind him, Navy's Milt Campbell scored 7,555, the Rev. Bob Richards 7,054. For the first time in history, three decathlon competitors had bettered 7,000 points, and U.S. Olympic hopes, already floating in numbers, rose even higher.

* In which the best of competing jumpers qualified for spear-throwing, the four best spear-tossers ran a sprint race, the three fastest sprinters flung a discus, and the two finalists wrestled for a wreath of olive leaves. The modern decathlon consists of the 100-meter dash, broad jump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter run, 110-meter hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw, 1,500-meter run.

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