Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, who helped bring Summer Games to L.A., dies at 86

As the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles neared, city leaders knew they needed to start strong. Many doubted the city could pull off such a global event, and a weak or botched opening ceremony might prove them right.

For the key role of lighting the Olympic flame, organizers chose Rafer Johnson, winner of the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medal and one of the city’s most treasured athletes. But in preparation for the opening ceremony, Johnson discovered a problem.

Plans called for Johnson to carry the Olympic torch up the progressively steeper stairs of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and then up an even steeper — and shaky — set of steps to a platform where he was to turn to the crowd, flaming torch in hand, and open the Games by igniting a gas jet. But the top step was so narrow, and the riser so wobbly, that Johnson asked for a handhold to be installed.

The producer of the ceremony protested, saying a handhold would ruin photos of the moment.

“What would be a worse picture,” Johnson replied, “me holding on to something or me falling headfirst down to the floor of the Coliseum?”

Johnson got the handhold, and his lighting of the Olympic flame proved to be an iconic moment in a widely praised ceremony.

It was a fulfilling role for Johnson, a man whose legacy was interwoven with Los Angeles’ history, beginning with his performances as a world-class athlete at UCLA and punctuated by the night in 1968 when he helped disarm Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin at the Ambassador Hotel.

Forever a civic booster in the metropolis where he lived, Johnson died Wednesday at his home in Sherman Oaks. The Olympian’s death was confirmed by his family. He was 86.

The son of Texas farmworkers who moved to California when he was young, Johnson rose to become the World’s Greatest Athlete, the unofficial title bestowed on the winner of the Olympic decathlon at a time when track and field stars received the adulation that today is bestowed on the best of the NFL and NBA.

At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Johnson was the U.S. team’s flag bearer, the first Black American so honored. His decathlon battle that year with C.K. Yang — his training partner at UCLA — ranks among the classic moments of Olympics history.

Rafer Johnson holds the cauldron that he used to light the Olympic flame for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

In an eventful life, Johnson broke racial barriers, played an unexpected role in the international relations of the Cold War and immersed himself in the turbulent politics of the 1960s. To help disabled children, Johnson co-founded the California Special Olympics in 1969 and served as its president for 10 years.

In contrast to the anything-to-win attitudes often found in sports today, the deeply religious Johnson was always a vocal advocate for fair play and good sportsmanship. He eschewed drugs and alcohol and, in track races, refused even to try to anticipate the starter’s gun, believing that it was a form of cheating.

“It seems funny to say winning is not all-important — I always want to win, and no one likes to lose,” he once said. “But when you start out on the field, everyone is equal. That is the important idea.”

Rafer Lewis Johnson was born during the Depression, on Aug. 18, 1934, in Hillsboro, Texas, the second of six children born to Lewis Johnson, a cotton picker and farm handyman, and Alma Gibson Johnson. After a brief move to Oklahoma, the family returned to Texas when Johnson was 3 and settled in a Dallas home with no electricity or indoor plumbing.

When he was 9, Johnson’s parents, in search of a fresh start and better opportunities for their children, moved to the San Joaquin Valley town of Kingsburg, where most of the residents were of Swedish descent. The Johnsons were the only Black family.

Johnson and his siblings would join his parents picking cotton after school, on weekends, holidays and all summer. Johnson believed the hard work not only made him strong, but gave him discipline that would later help make him a successful athlete. In his 1998 autobiography, he wrote, “Thinking about picking cotton brings tears to my eyes to this day, just from remembering how hard my parents had to toil to earn a meager living.”

He recalled his father as a “kind, hard-working family man” when he was sober, but a “hell-raising drunk” who beat his wife when he’d been drinking. It was a specter that would loom over much of Johnson’s life.

Johnson remembered his years in Kingsburg fondly, saying it was like a “Frank Capra movie.” Still, there were dangers. Johnson once saved his brother Jimmy from drowning at a local swimming hole. Jimmy Johnson would later go on to play for the San Francisco 49ers and be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Johnson was a four-sport star in high school, lettering in football, baseball, basketball and, his favorite, track and field. “There was something pure and innocent about the sport: You ran, you jumped, you threw things, just as young men had done since the dawn of civilization,” he wrote in his autobiography.

For college, Johnson chose UCLA, in part because its alumni included Jackie Robinson, who broke the racial barrier in Major League Baseball, and Ralph Bunche, the first Black American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Still, Johnson encountered racism on campus. One white woman he was seeing was forced to choose between her sorority membership and dating a Black man. A fraternity rejected Johnson as a member because he was Black. But he was accepted elsewhere and became the first Black American to join a national fraternity at UCLA — Pi Lambda Phi.

Johnson’s fast ascendancy as a decathlete drew national attention. He won the Pan American Games in 1955, earning a spot on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He then broke the world record for the decathlon, establishing himself as the favorite for the 1956 Olympics.

But a knee injury and torn stomach muscle hampered Johnson and he finished second at the Games in Melbourne, Australia, a bitter disappointment.

Back at UCLA, Johnson was elected student body president, a position that brought him “a pile of hate mail,” he recalled, with one letter asking, “Who do you think you are, black boy?”

In 1958, with Cold War tensions at their height, much of the world’s attention was drawn to the first U.S.-USSR track meet, to be held in Moscow. In the spotlight was the battle to be the World’s Greatest Athlete between Johnson and Vasili Kuznetsov, who held the world record then.

Onlookers built it up as a battle between communism and the free world, a role that made Johnson uncomfortable.

“I was fully aware of the irony that a Black man was an emissary of a nation where discrimination raged and racists got away with lynchings,” he said. “I found myself affected by the political overtones despite my efforts to ignore them.”

In the end, Johnson turned in his best decathlon yet, beating Kuznetsov and again breaking the world record. When it was all done, the Soviet crowd rushed the field, and Johnson thought they were going to attack him. Instead, they raised him on their shoulders and shouted his name.

“Never in the history of track has an athlete performed so well as Rafer Johnson in Moscow,” wrote Sports Illustrated.

In 1958-59, Johnson played basketball for legendary UCLA coach John Wooden and began training with Yang, a Taiwanese athlete who had come to UCLA and emerged as a decathlete nearly as strong as Johnson. The competitive rivals would develop a unique friendship.

“Ours was the purest of rivalries,” Johnson recalled. “We each wanted the other guy to do well, but we wanted even more to win.”

Sports

Rafer Johnson: A life in Photos

A life in photos

Dec. 2, 2020

Though Olympic success could cement an athlete’s fame, the rules of amateurism at the time kept Johnson from cashing in. He had to turn down a role in the movie “Spartacus” for fear it would endanger his eligibility and, for a while, he was forced to pay his bills flipping burgers at Culver City’s Hamburger Handout.

Johnson hurt his back in a 1959 car accident, forcing him to sit out a year’s worth of competition, and raising questions about whether he could compete at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

But that doubt was erased when Johnson won the 1960 Olympic trials, yet again setting a new world record in the process.

Johnson’s two-day battle with Yang in Rome was a drama-fueled duel. The first day’s events were interrupted by downpours, keeping the athletes on the track until nearly midnight. Johnson, leading Yang by a small margin of 55 points, got just five hours’ sleep. No other competitors were close to the two leaders.

By 10 p.m. on the second day, Johnson led Yang by just 67 points with only the final event — the 1,500-meter run — remaining. Johnson hated the 1,500 and Yang was better at it. If Yang beat Johnson by more than 10 seconds, the gold would go to him.

But Johnson determinedly stuck on Yang’s heels lap after lap and ran the fastest 1,500 meters of his life. He finished just 1.2 seconds behind Yang, claiming the gold medal. An exhausted Johnson immediately announced he was retiring from the sport.

Johnson’s victory brought him attention from surprising places. In 1961, the Los Angeles Rams picked him in the NFL draft, though Johnson hadn’t played football since high school. He also was offered a spot on the Harlem Globetrotters.

He passed on the offers and instead dabbled in the movies, landing supporting roles in about a dozen films and several TV shows.

Johnson had a short career as a TV reporter, covering the 1964 Olympics for NBC and then working as a sports anchor for KNBC in Los Angeles.

At an awards dinner in 1961, Johnson met Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general. Their political and social views meshed and they quickly became friends. Soon, Johnson was a regular guest at Kennedy’s homes in Virginia and Massachusetts on Cape Cod, playing touch football and scuba diving off Edward M. Kennedy’s yacht.

When Robert Kennedy announced his run for president in 1968, Johnson jumped in with full support, addressing rallies, speaking at news conferences and meeting with voters. At public events, Johnson and former Rams football player Roosevelt Grier stayed so close to Kennedy that people thought they were his bodyguards.

On the night of June 5, 1968, Kennedy spoke to jubilant supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. after winning the California Democratic primary. As he went to leave, gunshots rang out, and Kennedy fell, mortally wounded.

Johnson and others rushed the gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, and Johnson said he grabbed the gun, still in Sirhan’s hand. Johnson said he twisted Sirhan’s fingers to get the gun loose, and put it in his pocket. Hours later on the chaotic night, Johnson realized he still had the gun and turned it over to police.

Kennedy’s assassination left Johnson traumatized and depressed, but he found a new direction by helping launch the California Special Olympics, the athletics event for disabled children. It was a cause he remained involved in the rest of his life. From 1983-92, he was president of the Special Olympics Southern California. He also had a long career at Continental Telephone, rising to vice president of personnel.

In 1971, Johnson married Betsy Thorsen and they had a daughter, Jennifer, and a son, Joshua, all of whom survive him.

In 1979, L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley asked Johnson to join the board of the committee bringing the 1984 Summer Olympics to the city.

As the Games approached, speculation swirled about who would be the final torchbearer, usually an athlete who stirred exceptional pride in the host nation. Would it be Mark Spitz, winner of seven gold medals in swimming in 1972? Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion?

About 10 days before the July 28 ceremony, Johnson was called to a meeting with Peter Ueberroth, president of the organizing committee, and David Wolper, the producer of the opening ceremony. Ueberroth said he wanted Johnson to light the flame.

“By the time his words left his breath and hit my ears, I had said yes,” Johnson recalled.

Five years earlier, Johnson had cast the deciding vote in the balloting that elected Ueberroth president of the organizing committee. But Ueberroth was always adamant later that Johnson was not chosen to light the flame as a gesture of gratitude.

Johnson was ordered to keep the news quiet. The media were chasing it and Ueberroth, who loved the intrigue, wanted it to be a surprise, as the announcement of the final torchbearer usually is.

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Kobe Bryant, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sean Connery and more.  (Los Angeles Times)

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Rafer Johnson, winner of the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medal, was a man whose legacy was interwoven with Los Angeles history, beginning with his performances as a world-class athlete at UCLA and punctuated by the night in 1968 when he helped disarm Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin at the Ambassador Hotel. Johnson lit the Olympic flame at the opening of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. He was 86.
  (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

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Rep. John Lewis famously shed his blood at the foot of a Selma, Ala., bridge in a 1965 demonstration for Black voting rights, and went on to become a 17-term Democratic member of Congress. An inspirational figure for decades, Lewis was one of the last survivors among members of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle. He was 80.
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Country music firebrand and fiddler Charlie Daniels started out as a session musician, which included playing on Bob Dylan’s 1969 album “Nashville Skyline,” and beginning in the early 1970s toured endlessly with his own band, sometimes doing 250 shows a year. In 1979, Daniels had a crossover smash with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” which topped the country chart, hit No. 3 on the pop chart and was voted single of the year by the Country Music Assn. He was 83.  (Rick Diamond / Getty Images for IEBA)

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Carl Reiner first came to national attention in the 1950s on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” where he wrote alongside Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and other comedy legends. He later created “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” one of TV’s most fondly remembered sitcoms, and directed hit films including “The Comic” (1969), starring Van Dyke; “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), starring George Segal and Ruth Gordon; “Oh, God!” starring George Burns and John Denver; and four films starring Steve Martin. He was 98.   (Associated Press )

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Don Shula was the NFL’s winningest coach, leading the 1972 Miami Dolphins to the league’s only undefeated season. He coached the Baltimore Colts to one Super Bowl and the Dolphins to five, winning Lombardi Trophies after the 1972 and ’73 seasons. He was 90.
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Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak crushed dissent for decades until the 2011 Arab Spring movement drove him from power. During his presidency, which spanned nearly 30 years, he protected Egypt’s stability as intifadas roiled Israel and the Palestinian territories, the U.S. led two wars against Iraq, Iran fomented militant Shiite Islam across the region and global terrorism complicated the divide between East and West. He was 91.  (Sameh Sherif / AFP/Getty Images)

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Among his 40-odd films, burly Brian Dennehy played a sheriff who jailed Rambo in “First Blood,” a serial killer in “To Catch a Killer” and a corrupt sheriff in “Silverado.” On Broadway, he was awarded Tonys for his roles in “Death of a Salesman” (1999) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2003). He was 81.  (Dia Dipasupil)

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Singer-songwriter John Prine broke onto the folk scene in 1971 with a self-titled album that included two songs brought to broader audiences by Bette Midler and Bonnie Raitt: “Hello in There” and “Angel From Montgomery,” respectively. In 2019, he was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was 73.  (Frazer Harrison / Getty Images for Stagecoach)

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Country singer Kenny Rogers racked up an impressive string of hits — initially as a member of The First Edition starting in the late 1960s and later as a solo artist and duet partner with Dolly Parton — and earned three Grammy Awards, 19 nominations and a slew of accolades from country-music awards shows. Country purists balked at his syrupy ballads, but his fans packed arenas that only the titans of rock could fill. He was 81.  (Suzanne Mapes / Associated Press)

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Swedish actor Max von Sydow starred in several Ingmar Bergman movies, including “The Seventh Seal” (above, at left) and “The Virgin Spring,” then built a varied body of U.S. work that included the 1973 horror blockbuster “The Exorcist.” In a career that began in 1949, his rich repertory included Jesus Christ, clergymen, pontiffs, knights, conquerors, villains and the devil incarnate. He was 90.  (File photo)

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Xerox researcher Larry Tesler pioneered concepts that made computers more user-friendly, including moving text through cut, copy and paste. In 1980, he joined Apple, where he worked on the Lisa computer, the Newton personal digital assistant and the Macintosh. He was 74.  (AP)

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Mathematician Katherine Johnson calculated rocket trajectories for NASA’s early space missions, including Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space, and John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 2015, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama, and the next year was portrayed in the film “Hidden Figures.” She was 101.  (NASA/Bill Ingalls )

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Ski industry pioneer Dave McCoy transformed a remote Sierra peak into the storied Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Over six decades, it grew from a downhill depot for friends to a profitable operation of 3,000 workers and 4,000 acres of ski trails and lifts, a mecca for generations of skiers and boarders. He was 104.  (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

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Veteran TV personality Orson Bean brought his wit to “What’s My Line?” and “To Tell the Truth,” guest-starred on variety shows and bantered with talk show hosts such as Johnny Carson and Mike Douglas. Later in his career, he starred in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” and “Desperate Housewives” while becoming a mainstay of Los Angeles’ small theater scene. He was 91.  ( Sean Smith)

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Screen icon Kirk Douglas brought a clenched-jawed intensity to an array of heroes and heels, receiving Oscar nominations for his performances as an opportunistic movie mogul in the 1952 drama “The Bad and the Beautiful” and as Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 drama “Lust for Life.” As executive producer of “Spartacus,” Douglas helped end the Hollywood blacklist by giving writer Dalton Trumbo screen credit under his own name. He was 103.  (Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times)

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Fred Silverman was the head of programming at CBS, where he championed a string of hits including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “All in the Family,” “MASH” and “The Jeffersons.” Later at ABC, he programmed “Laverne & Shirley,” “The Love Boat,” “Happy Days” and the 12-hour epic saga “Roots.” He was 82.  (Associated Press)

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Kobe Bryant was just 18 when he started playing for the Lakers, but by the end of his 20-year career — all of it as a Laker — the Black Mamba was a five-time world champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist and 18-time All-Star. His post-basketball career included an Oscar for the animated short “Dear Basketball” and a series of children’s books that became New York Times bestsellers. He was 41.  (Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE / Getty Images)

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Former California Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark Jr. represented the East Bay in Congress for 40 years. The influential Democrat helped craft the Affordable Care Act, the signature healthcare achievement of the Obama administration, and also created the 1986 law best known as COBRA, which allows workers to stay on their employer’s health insurance plan after they leave a job. He was 88.  (Associated Press)

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News anchor Jim Lehrer appeared 12 times as a presidential debate moderator and helped build “PBS NewsHour” into an authoritative voice of public broadcasting. The program, first called “The Robert MacNeil Report” and then “The MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” became the nation’s first one-hour TV news broadcast in 1983. Lehrer was 85.  (David McNew / Getty Images)

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Terry Jones was a founding member of the Monty Python troupe who wrote and performed for their early ’70s TV series and films including “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in 1975 and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in 1979. After the Pythons largely disbanded in the 1980s, Jones wrote books on medieval and ancient history, presented documentaries, wrote poetry and directed films. He was 77.  (Associated Press)

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Rush drummer Neil Peart was one of the most accomplished instrumentalists in rock history. Peart often cited swing-era drummers Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich among his primary inspirations, although he also credited Keith Moon, Ginger Baker and John Bonham as major influences. He was 67.  (Andrew MacNaughtan)

So Johnson told only his wife, and began his workouts during a family vacation at her parents’ home in Newport Beach. “I got a couple of five-pound weights,” he said, “and I ran up and down inside a parking garage.”

Johnson was 49 at the time, but in rehearsals for the opening ceremony, Wolper was making his torchbearer feel like an old man.

“Those steps were killers,” Johnson says. “I never got all the way up in rehearsals.”

On the temporary ladder at the top, each step was white, each was narrow. The ladder tended to rock if Johnson didn’t stay in the center. So he had them paint black dots in the center of each step, and two dots in the center of the top step.

At Johnson’s request, workers drilled a 36-inch fiberglass pole on the top step that stood to his left as he faced the crowd and gave him a handhold.

At the ceremony, Johnson received the torch and started up the stairs. On the temporary ladder he concentrated on the dots.

“When I got up there, and I turned and saw the crowd, saw that view, and there was nothing behind me, and I’m standing on something about a foot wide, I know I would have fallen. I can’t even explain the feeling. My heart was pounding in my chest. I felt like I was going to die.”

He raised 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 cauldron, which erupted in fire.

Watching on television, Johnson’s former broadcasting colleague Tom 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.”

Staff writer David Wharton contributed to this article.