Otis Davis, Who Overcame Racism to Win Olympic Gold, Dies at 92
At the 1960 Summer Games in Rome, he set a world record in the 400-meter race and another in the 4 x 400 relay, where he anchored the United States team’s victory.
Otis Davis, who was not allowed to attend the University of Alabama, in his home state, because he was Black, but flourished at the University of Oregon, which became his springboard to winning two gold medals in sprints at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, died on Saturday in hospice care in North Bergen, N.J. He was 92.
His daughter Liza Davis confirmed the death.
Davis was part of a stellar American athletic contingent in Rome that included the boxer Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, the decathlete Rafer Johnson and the basketball player Oscar Robertson.
Davis did not have the star power of those athletes, but he had a compelling story.
He left the Jim Crow-era South after graduating from high school, served four years in the Air Force and received a basketball scholarship to Oregon. He was converted to a sprinter by the school’s track and field coach, Bill Bowerman, who would later found Nike with Phil Knight.
Shortly before the Olympics in Rome began, Bowerman provided a scouting report on Davis’s forthcoming men’s 400-meter race. “His job is simple to remember,” Bowerman told The Capital Journal, of Salem, Ore. “He is supposed to start fast and finish before any of the rest of them.” He added, “I think he can.”
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On Sept. 6, 1960, Davis got off to a slow start in the final. Halfway through, however, he accelerated with sudden force and took the lead. But was he running too fast, putting himself in danger of tiring and being passed? His lead, which had stretched to seven yards, began to shrink in the last 100 meters. Carl Kaufmann, a Brooklyn-born runner competing for Germany, was closing in.
“Davis ran upright — ‘swayback,’ he called it — with his hands in front of him, while the German leaned far forward at the end, his head low, his hands winging behind him as though he were preparing to dive into a pool,” David Maraniss wrote in his book “Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World” (2008).
Both men crossed the finish line with the same time — a world-record 44.9 seconds — but the photo finish was decided in Davis’s favor. Kaufmann took the silver medal, Malcolm Spence of South Africa the bronze.
“They didn’t think any human could go that fast, and I didn’t either,” Davis told The Register-Guard, of Eugene, Ore., in 2015. “If you can imagine, I was still learning how to run in different lanes.”
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Two days later, Davis ran in the 4 x 400 relay. As he waited to run the anchor leg, Jack Yerman took the lead over Germany. It was extended slightly by Earl Young, who then handed a three-yard edge to Glenn Davis. When Otis Davis took the baton, he had a four-yard lead in a rematch against Kaufmann.
“I accelerated a little to make Kaufmann use his strength to catch me, then I floated,” Davis told Track & Field News after the race. “When he came up again, I’d accelerate, then float again. I figured he’d use up his power trying to catch me each time, then I’d turn on the kick and walk away.”
The Americans won in a world-record time of 3 minutes 2.2 seconds.
Otis Crandall Davis was born on July 12, 1932, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and raised by his maternal grandmother, Carrie Eaton. He occasionally lived with his mother, Mary Alice Davis, a science teacher and movie theater cashier, and his father, Johnie Davis, a bellhop.
Tuscaloosa was segregated at the time; although there was an all-white high school about a block from his home, Otis attended an all-Black school more than a mile away. He once saw Ku Klux Klansmen march in Tuscaloosa and recalled feeling sad that some of the shorter ones were children.
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After serving four years in the Air Force in England and the United States, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he played basketball. He transferred to Oregon on a basketball scholarship in 1957, but after playing sparingly in his one season on the team, he shifted to track, with Bowerman’s encouragement — first as a high jumper and then as a sprinter.
“Otis never had run the 440 until this year,” Bowerman told The Oregonian in 1959, “but he has the strength, the speed and the determination necessary.”
Davis finished seventh in the 440-yard dash in the N.C.A.A. track and field championships in 1959, but he placed third in the 400-meter race at the U.S. Olympic trials a year later, qualifying him for the team headed for Rome.
He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in health and physical education in 1960.
After the Olympics, he raced for another year and, in his final event, in 1961, successfully defended his 400-meter title at the Amateur Athletic Union’s national track and field championships, on Randall’s Island in New York.
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After Davis’s competitive career was over, his jobs included physical education teacher at a high school in Oregon, civilian sports director at Army bases in Germany, athletic director at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, counselor for the Urban League in Jersey City and truant officer in Union City, N.J. He also ran youth sports programs in New Jersey and the Bronx.
Last year, he published a memoir, “Destiny’s Daredevil: The Autobiography of an Olympic Champion Helping Others Cross the Finish Line.”
In addition to his daughter Liza, Davis is survived by another daughter, Diana Davis, and a grandson. His marriage to Lucille Mathes ended in divorce.
In early March 1994, burglars broke into Davis’s apartment in the Heights neighborhood of Jersey City and stole his gold medals. Neighbors heard about the theft and raised a banner on the porch of a nearby house that said, “Bring Home Otis Davis’ Gold.”
Police recovered the medals about a month later.
“Things happened so fast, it was like magic,” Davis told The Jersey Journal. “The timing couldn’t have been more perfect — Good Friday. Now I can have a Happy Easter.”
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Otis Crandall Davis (July 12, 1932 – September 14, 2024) was an American athlete, winner of two gold medals for record-breaking performances in the 400 m and 4 × 400 m relay at the 1960 Summer Olympics. He set a new world record of 44.9 seconds in the 400 m and became the first person to break the 45-second barrier.[1]
Early life
[edit]Otis Crandall Davis was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on July 12, 1932.[2][3] He was black and Native American. His father, Johnie Davis, worked as a bellhop, and his mother, Mary Alice Davis, taught science and worked as a movie theater cashier.[3] He grew up in a segregated Alabama,[4] and was raised by his maternal grandmother, Carrie Eaton.[3]
He served four years in the United States Air Force during the Korean War.[5]
Career
[edit]College
[edit]Following the Air Force, Davis attended enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he played basketball.[3] In 1957, he transferred to the University of Oregon on a basketball scholarship.[6][3] One day in 1958 while observing athletes running on the track with a friend, Davis, who had never run before, nor attended schools in his youth with sports programs other than basketball and football, decided that he could beat the athletes he saw on the track.[6] He approached track coach Bill Bowerman, who would later become the founding father of the Nike, Inc., and asked to join the track team. Needing high jumpers instead, Bowerman had Davis try his hand.
Among Davis's first attempts, he jumped 6'0". He recalled: "I had no form. I had no style. I just jumped."[6] He also hit 23'0" in the long jump with little effort, though he was flustered by the sprinting events, relating "I didn't even know how to get in the starting blocks". For his first competitive event, Bowerman entered Davis in the 220-yard dash and the 440-yard dash in the Pacific Coast Conference championships, both of which he won, missing the school record by two tenths of a second in the latter.[6]
According to Davis, Bowerman made the first pair of Nike shoes for him, contradicting the claim that they were made for Phil Knight: "I told Tom Brokaw that I was the first. I don't care what all the billionaires say. Bill Bowerman made the first pair of shoes for me. People don't believe me. In fact, I didn't like the way they felt on my feet. There was no support and they were too tight. But I saw Bowerman make them from the waffle iron, and they were mine."[6]
In 1959, Davis finished seventh in the 440-yard dash in the NCAA Division I Men's Outdoor Track and Field Championships.[3]
In 1960, he graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.S. degree in Health & Physical Education.[6][7] The University honored him in 2020, as one of eight gold medalists who attended the school.[4] In addition, Davis, along with Bill Bowerman, Ashton Eaton, Steve Prefontaine and Raevyn Rogers, are depicted on a nine-foot tower adjacent to Hayward Field.[4]
Olympic
[edit]
Davis was competing on a national level for the Oregon Ducks, and was poised to become a national AAU champion in the 440-yard run.[6] At the age of 28, he made the 1960 United States Olympic team, placing third in the 400-meter race at the Olympic Trials.[3] He ran his fastest time to date one week before participating in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome as one of the oldest members of the track team, where he was nicknamed "Pops" by his teammates.[6] He remembered: "I was still learning how to turn with the staggered starts and all. I was still learning the strategy involved. I was still learning how to run in the lanes."[6]
On September 6, 1960,[4] Davis ran against the heavily favored German athlete Carl Kaufmann, who was born in Brooklyn[3] and held the world record in the 400-meter dash. Davis won by a hair, setting a world record of 44.9 seconds and becoming the first man to break the heralded 45-second barrier.[4][6] The photo of the finish, with (in full horizontal dive position) Kaufmann's nose ahead of Davis, but his torso behind, has been studied and discussed by track and field officials for years.[6][8] Both athletes were awarded the world record time, recorded in the 10ths of a second in those days, but Davis was awarded the win. Two days later, they met again for the 4 × 400 m relay final. Davis anchored the USA team of Jack Yerman, Earl Young and 400-meter hurdles gold medalist Glenn Davis, setting a world record of 3:02.2.[3][4][6][8] The photo of the finish of that race was also made famous in Life magazine.[8]
In 1996 he was a torch-bearer for the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.[2][6]
Post-Olympic
[edit]
Following the Olympics, Davis competed in some sporadic track meets, such as the 1961 U.S. Nationals at Randall's Island, which he won at age 29,[3] but his competitive running career was virtually over, as he never repeated his Olympic performance. He returned to Oregon, and later considered playing as wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams. After retiring from competition, he became a high school teacher, working in Springfield, Oregon, for many years, and then traveled overseas to work as an athletic director at United States military bases,[6] including McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey,[3] where he taught in 1989.[9]
In 1991, Davis moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, in order to live closer to New York, eventually settling in Union City.[6] Around 2002 or 2003,[6] Davis was hired by the Union City Board of Education, and began working at Emerson High School as a truancy officer, teacher, coach and mentor. When he was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 2003, he asked Emerson Principal Robert Fazio to accompany him to the ceremony in Los Angeles, and when the rest of the school's staff learned he was an Olympic medalist, they honored him with a banner posted in a hallway in the school honoring his achievements.[6]
In 2012, Davis was working as a verification officer at Union City High School, mentoring students.[2] He was also co-founder and, in 2012, president of the Tri-States Olympic Alumni Association, a member of the University of Oregon Hall of Fame and the New Jersey Sports Writers' Halls of Fame.[6]
Davis ran athletic skills programs during the spring and summer in Union City, in order to reach students who did not normally participate in sporting events, and to complement the schools' physical education curricula.[10] Among programs he directed were the Mayor's Cup, first held on June 6, 2011, in which students from the city's several elementary schools compete in events that include sprinting, spring relays and circle relays, and the Sports Challenge, which provides special needs children with the opportunity to be a part of sports activities.[10]
In 2023, Davis published a memoir, “Destiny’s Daredevil: The Autobiography of an Olympic Champion Helping Others Cross the Finish Line.” [3][11]
Personal life and death
[edit]Davis was married to and divorced from Lucille Mathes, and had two daughters.[3]
In 1994, burglars stole Davis's gold medals from his home in New Jersey, but they were recovered and returned within a month.[3]
Davis died in North Bergen, New Jersey, on September 14, 2024, at the age of 92.[3][12]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Evans, Hilary; Gjerde, Arild; Heijmans, Jeroen; Mallon, Bill; et al. "Otis Davis". Olympics at Sports-Reference.com. Sports Reference LLC. Archived from the original on April 17, 2020.
- ^ a b c "Otis Davis" Archived June 14, 2024, at the Wayback Machine. USA Track & Field. Retrieved March 20, 2012.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Sandomir, Richard (September 20, 2024). "Otis Davis, Who Overcame Racism to Win Olympic Gold, Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f Moseley, Rob and Zach Lawson. But First There Was Otis. UO Athletics. Hayward Field, University of Oregon. 2020. https://hayward.uoregon.edu/otis-davis
- ^ "Double 1960 Olympic champion American runner Otis Davis dies at 92". India Today. Archived from the original on September 17, 2024. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Hague, Jim (May 14, 2006). "Truant officer was Olympic hero Emerson High has gold medalist in midst". The Hudson Reporter. Archived from the original on May 4, 2012. Retrieved March 19, 2012.
- ^ "Biography" Archived November 25, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. OtisDavisOlympian.com. Retrieved March 20, 2012.
- ^ a b c Lee, Jimson (September 13, 2009). "Otis Davis, 1960 400 meter and 4x400m Olympic Champion" Archived April 17, 2019, at the Wayback Machine. SpeedEndurance.com
- ^ "Otis Davis". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
- ^ a b Machcinski, Anthony J. (December 20, 2012). "Union City Olympian Otis Davis, now 80, keeps up with community contributions". NJ.com.
- ^ Otis Davis’s Newly Released "Destiny’s Daredevil" is a Fascinating Memoir That Takes Readers on a Journey of Discovery and Unexpected Blessings. News release. Christian Faith Publishing. https://www.pr.com/press-release/890277
- ^ "Otis Davis, 1960 Olympic 400m gold medalist, dies at age 92". NBC Sports. September 16, 2024. Archived from the original on September 16, 2024. Retrieved September 16, 20
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