(3 of 7)
Nevertheless, he still gets a slight tightening of the stomach before he goes into action. "It's like waiting for a funeral," he says. Once the meet begins, his nervous twinges disappear. He moves with disciplined relaxation; even at the finish line his face shows only concentration, with none of the agonized contortions of a last-ounce effort. As the competition gets keener, the only apparent effect is to key his reactions a bit tighter and sharpen his sense of timing. "When the pressure's on," he says, "I like it best." Between events, while other athletes trot nervously back & forth, talking and worrying, he tosses a towel over his head and lies down in the shelter of the stands until he is called for the next round. Sometimes he falls asleep.
"Dream Competitor." During the whole exhausting two-day grind that a decathlon lasts, Mathias is as cool and impersonal as a coach directing a football team, constantly checking in his mind the complicated point score, deciding when to push himself to the limit, when to hold back to conserve his energy. Even when he was a green 17-year-old at the 1948 Olympics, he steadfastly refused to take his turn at the pole vault until the bar was set at 10 feet. He saw no point in wasting his energy on heights he was sure he could clear. His final vault: 11 ft. 5¾ in.
"You can't predict what he can do," says Ray Dean, Stanford's assistant track coach. "All you can be sure of is that he will win. He is absolutely the greatest athlete I ever coached. He is the dream competitor—the one in 10,000 who has the temperament to match the talent."
To the proud citizens of Tulare (pop. 14,000), Calif., probably the only town in the U.S. where the decathlon is the most popular after-school pastime, Coach Dean is guilty of understatement. In Tulare (pronounced to Larry), Bob Mathias is rated, quite simply, as the greatest athlete in history—a sort of peerless combination of Jack Armstrong, Frank Merriwell and Gene Tunney. Says one admiring Tularean: "No matter who you are, you've got to like him if you've seen him the way we have. If you were a mother or father, Bob's the kind of guy you'd want for a son; if you were a fellow, you'd want him for a chum; and if you were a girl—well, just look at the guy."
At least part of these claims is substantiated by the record books. Compared with the man generally considered the outstanding athlete of all time, Mathias outruns, outjumps and out-throws Indian Jim Thorpe* in nine of the ten decathlon events. The exception (see chart) the 1,500-meter run.
Though Bob can dash 100 meters in 0:10.7 (Olympic record: 0:10.3), a childhood case of anemia still leaves him short of the endurance required to run the metric mile. It is just about his only athletic shortcoming. He is a one-man track team, capable of winning the majority of U.S. college track meets singlehanded. His best official discus throw, 173 ft. 4 in., is 2 in. better than the Olympic record.