The American, one of four men to win three sprint gold medals at an Olympic Games, is remembered as much for the infamy his business dealings provoked as his glorious running style
Four men have won the sprint triple at the Olympics and, chances are, you know three of them: Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt. Then there is Bobby Joe Morrow, who died last Sunday at the age of 84. When Morrow won the 100m, 200m, and the 4x100m at the Melbourne Games in 1956 he was, briefly, as famous as any of the other three. He was a guest on the Ed Sullivan show, same episode as Marcel Marceau, and Arthur Godfrey and His Friends, he made the cover of Life magazine and was even named by the US Chamber of Commerce as one of nine Great Living Americans, right alongside Cecil B DeMille and Norman Rockwell.
Sports Illustrated made him its sportsman of 1956, the same year Floyd Patterson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history and Mickey Mantle won the triple crown for the Yankees. Morrow was 21 years old, tall, handsome, and “the Beau Ideal of the US Olympic team”. He grew up on a farm in San Benito, way down in south-east Texas, his father was an elder in the Church of Christ, and the family were “prosperous, unostentatious, and deeply religious”. The way they told it, his only vice was ice cream. It made him something “a little larger than a fine sprinter”. He was the “sort of American which most of the world has had too little opportunity to know”.
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