The decathlon made Jim Thorpe the most famous American Indian since Sitting Bull. It won Glenn Morris a job playing Tarzan in the movies. It turned Bob Mathias, a 17-year-old high-schooler, into a national hero, and it earned a college education for a Negro lad named Rafer Johnson whose family were so poor that they lived in a boxcar on a railroad siding. The only thing the two-day, ten-event contest has done for California's Bill Toomey, 27, and Russ Hodge, 26, is run up their doctors' bills. Bill suffers from shin splints and heel spurs; Russ has bursitis in...
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