A champion lost to history

Everybody loved Bobby Morrow when he was perfect and fleet afoot, but that was a long time ago, in the early to mid-1950s, when he was a sports hero on the order of LeBron James or Patrick Mahomes or anybody else you want to mention today. 

Born in Harlingen in 1938, Morrow was a football star at San Benitio High School but a superstar on the track where he won 17 consecutive 100 and 220-yard dashes and two consecutive state championships in both events. College wasn’t in his plans until several of them offered scholarships. 

Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University ACU) track coach Oliver Jackson, who was quietly assembling one of the country’s best group of sprinters, convinced Morrow to run for the Wildcats. 

“Bobby had a fluidity of motion like nothing I’d ever seen,” Jackson told Sports Illustrated in 2000. “He could run with a root beer float on his head and never spill a drop. I made an adjustment to his start when Bobby was a freshman. After that, my only advice to him was to change his major from ag sciences to speech, because he’d be destined to make a bunch of them.”  

Morrow clocked a 20.6 in the 200-meter dash at the 1956 NAIA track and field championship, which equaled the best ever time on a course with a full turn and he also claimed the 100-meter dash title, where his 10.2 equaled another world record. The ACU 200-meter relay team, which Morrow anchored, tied the world record in that event. 

The track and field world noted Morrow’s accomplishments but wasn’t overly impressed. East coast track and field purists were suspicious of the wind gauges used at the West Texas meets. Then Morrow went to the U.S. Olympic trials and won both the 100 and 200-meter dashes. 

At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, Morrow claimed the gold medal in the 100-meters and 200-meters and anchored the 4 x 100 relay team that broke a 20-year-old world record. His performance equaled that of his hero, Jesse Owens, who won gold medals in the same events in 1936.  

Back in America, Bobby Morrow enjoyed the kind of celebrity usually afforded astronauts and war heroes. He went on the “Ed Sullivan” show and appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Sports Illustrated named him “Sportsman of the Year” over Mickey Mantle and Paul Hornung. 

“Thrice last autumn, while sound boiled up from all the broad decks and crowded galleries of Melbourne’s historic Cricket Ground, a rangy, dark-thatched and extraordinarily self-possessed young sprinter from Texas fled to victory ahead of the fastest runners in the world,” the Sports Illustrated story began.  The country just couldn’t get enough of the All-America boy from Abilene. 

Morrow dabbled in public relations work at ACU. He ran at invitational meets around the country for the free meals that came with them. The Olympic committee was wildly paranoid about athletes getting paid. During an appearance on television’s “To Tell the Truth,” the network superimposed an announcement on the screen saying that his $25 winnings would be given to ACU.

A pulled groin muscle slowed Morrow on the eve of the 1960 Olympic trials and kept him from qualifying for the U.S. team, but he was Bobby Morrow, the world’s fastest human. The coaches asked him to stay with the team in California, the idea being that he might get a spot on the team as an alternate. He continued working out and the leg got better. 

The U.S. coach, Larry Snyder, told him to show up at the Los Angeles airport and fly to Rome with the team, but when he got there Snyder told him there was no room for him on the plane. 

Morrow never completely got over the slight. And he never ran track again. His first marriage fell apart. The pressures of his fame might have had something to do with it, but his first wife, Jo Ann Richey, told Sports Illustrated that the snub in Los Angeles might have been a factor. 

“That was an awful way to treat Bobby, and it stuck with him,” she said. 

Morrow got involved with some business associates who turned out to be crooks, and he went to work for a Houston bank where he found the same class of people. The All-America boy grew disillusioned with sport, celebrity and life in general. 

In time he returned to San Benito and farmed cotton and operated a few low-key business ventures. He has mostly stayed away from ACU and the Olympics. He was elected to the Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1975. In 2006, San Benito named its new athletic facility Bobby Morrow Stadium. 

Asked by Texas Monthly in 1984 if he was sorry the Olympic gold and his fleeting fame had ever happened to him, Morrow answered without hesitation, “Yeah, I am,” he said. “I really am.”

Bobby Morrow died on May 30, 2020, at the age of 84. He was and remains, as the Guardian wrote in 2016, “a champion lost to history.”