Some people seek the limelight, some people try and avoid it, and some simply can’t avoid it. Then there are those who simply fall outside of its arc.
There may be many reasons for this, but timing is often a key reason.
For most of his life Milt Campbell asked himself why his achievements went unrecognised..
Milton Gray Campbell, more commonly known as “Milt”, was born on December 9, 1933, in Plainfield, New Jersey. His father, Thomas, was a New York City cabdriver and his mother, Edith worked as a domestic houseworker. The couple split up when Milt was young. So he and his older brother, Tom, moved in with their grandmother in the
racially mixed town of Plainfield. She was the one who taught the boys that they must learn to stand on their own two feet. A religious woman, she would constantly share religious quotes with the boys. “The Lord helps those that help themselves,” was apparently one of her favourites.
From a young age he loved sports. HIs motivating force was to out-perform Tom. The competitive streak really came to the fore when he attended Plainfield High School. Here he competed for the school in track and field, American football and swimming. By participating in Swimming events he shattered the myth that African-Americans were unable to swim properly. He became an All American High School swimmer. To increase the legend of his schoolboy prowess at any sport, he once stepped in as a substitute for a sick heavyweight wrestler. So the story goes he took only a minute and a half to pin the boy who would later go on to be state champion!
To give an idea as to how accomplished this young man was, while still in high school and only 18 years old he was selected for the 1952 USA Olympic team. That may not impress many as there were a great number of athletes before and after who have competed at such a young age. However there are are very few who have competed in the most gruelling of events, the decathlon. This was the event that Milt was selected for.
Prior to his selection to represent the USA at the Olympic Games in Helsinki Milt had been selected All State for all three sports, but it was track and field he enjoyed the most. One day it is claimed that he told his coach that he aspired to be the greatest athlete in the entire state of New Jersey. His coach replied that he believed Milt could possibly become the best athlete in the world. This response caught the young athlete off guard and he asked his coach how he could achieve that. HIs coach told him that he must win the Olympic decathlon.
Milt did not even know what the Decathlon was at that time!
However after looking up what made up the Decathlon, he decided to give it a go.
The Olympic qualifiers would be his first-ever participation in a decathlon event. He qualified for the Olympic Games and at the Games came second behind Bob Mathias, the gold medalist from the previous 1948 London Games. When he returned to New Jersey, he was given a heroes homecoming for earning a silver medal in the event, but Milt was not happy. He wanted to win.
He realised that he was going to have to work and train harder and that is what he did at the Indiana University; where he also continued to play Gridiron.
By the time the Melbourne Olympic Games rolled around in 1956 he was ready. His main rival was fellow American Rafer Johnson who was also competing in the long jump; know then as the broad jump.
The Star-Ledger of Newark interviewed Milt Campbell in 2011 and he told a tale about Johnson, who unfortunately injured his knee and pulled a muscle in his stomach and was unable to compete in the long jump, but would still compete in the Decathlon.
“Rafer sat on the bed and said, ‘So how do you think this is going to turn out?’ And I just said: ‘This is a bad year for you to show up. Because this could be your two best days, but I’m still going to walk away with it.’ And Rafer looked at me like I had hit him with a bat.” Milt would win gold and Johnson silver, despite his injury, he would claim gold four years later in Rome.
Milt meanwhile set an Olympic record of 7,937 points for the 10 events.
On his return to the USA the attention that Mathias and subsequent champions of the decathlon such as Rafer Johnson, Bill Toomey and Bruce Jenner never came Milt’s way. Which was surprising as his win was the first by a black athlete and the first by an African American athlete in the Decathlon.
No endorsements came his way after his victory which rankled him. Why was this the case? Was it because in 1956 the Olympics Games were not televised as extensively as they have been since the 1960’s? When asked about these differences in 1996 Milt told Sports Illustrated that he believed that “America wasn’t ready for a black man to be the best athlete in the world”
Yet had this oversight been limited to being just at the time then Milt Campbell may well have been able to move on, but even with the passing of time he remained forgotten.
In 1983, when the U.S. Olympic Committee started its Hall of Fame, Mathias and Johnson were among the 20 inaugural members inducted. Milt Campbell was not even on the ballot for election! It was not until 1992 that he was elected to the Hall of Fame.
One thing that has often been lost in the story of Milt Campbell is that when he went to Indiana University he went on a football scholarship and ran track. He did not have an athletics scholarship. Yet he would end up holding a world record in the hurdles. To this day he is the only Decathlete to ever hold a world record in an individual event!
He was 6ft 3in (190cm) and weighed 210 pounds (95kgs), he was a big unit of a man and powerful. It has been written that he was “bigger than the fast players and faster than the big ones.”
In the 1957 NFL draft the Cleveland Browns selected Milt Campbell in the fifth round after using their first pick to get Jim Brown of Syracuse. Milt would last only one season at the club. Milt always believed that the reason for this had nothing to do with football and everything to do with his marrying Barbara Mount, who was a white woman.
As he told Sports Illustrated “Paul Brown called me into his office and said, ‘What did you get married for?’ I looked him in the eye and I said, ‘Two reasons. Number one, I got married for the same reason you got married, I presume. And number two, that’s not a question you want to be asking.’ The next day I got a notice to come to the office, where they handed me a letter saying my services were no longer needed. I waited half a day in Paul Brown’s office, but he didn’t have the courage to come talk to me. And I was blackballed out of the league.”
The New York Giants had shown an interest in signing him, but now when he called them they would not return his calls. So he went to play in Canada up until he retired in 1964. Looking back on that period of his life in the same interview with Sports Illustrated he said “Here’s the greatest athlete in the world in 1956, and in 1958 I can’t get a job in America? With all the things I could do? I think its time somebody says, ‘who the hell are kidding? This guy got his ass kicked because he fell in love.’ You see in America nobody is going to dictate to me who I can love and who I can’t love.”
He and Barbara would remain married for 25 years. They raised three children of their own and took care of a couple of other children. According to Milt whenever she would see on television commentators talking about the greatest athletes and referring to the other decathletes already mentioned she would leave the room to cry because her husband had been overlooked again. The couple divorced in the 1980’s and Milt remarried.
When race riots broke out in Newark in 1967, Milt returned from Canada, where he had been living and working, to try and help quell the tension in New Jersey. In 1968, he co-founded a community centre and an alternative school there. The Chad School emphasized black history and culture. In 1976 his meat trucking business went broke and he became a motivational speaker.
Incredibly after his football career and with a desire to remain active Milt took up Judo. So good did he become that he was said to be in with a strong chance of making the USA team for the 1972 Olympic Games. Unfortunately for him the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) said that he could not compete because he had played professional football. This was in spite of the fact that American sprinters were receiving money to run!
In the year 2000 ESPN like many newspapers produced a list of the “50 Greatest Black Athletes” and the “Top 100 Athletes of the 20th Century.” Milt Campbell was not included or mentioned on either list.
As well as the United States Olympic Hall of Fame, Milt was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2012. He is also in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and remains the only individual to hold a place in both.
The Olympic filmmaker Bud Greenspan once said, “Campbell was, to me, the greatest athlete who ever lived.” Yet so few people know or have heard of Milt Campbell. In fact those that do know his story claim he is probably ‘the greatest athlete that no one has ever heard of.’
In 1980 he told the New York Times that after he lost his business “I realized that I understood about success and failure. I realized that it had nothing to do with anyone else, only me.” Milt Campbell may have been upset that his achievements never received the recognition that they deserved but you never heard him making excuses for his own failures. He was outspoken, he held strong opinions and some have tried to say that this was why he never received that recognition, because at that time people did not want to hear such opinions, let alone listen to them.
In November 2012 Milt Campbell passed away in his home in Gainesville, Georgia after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 78.
Hopefully those who read this will remember his name from now on.
It is also worth remembering something he told himself when he was at Indiana University whenever coaches told him that he could not do something, in particular if he grew any bigger he would not be able to compete. His advice was “It’s not important what you say to me, it’s important what I say to me.”
