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In other sports, he does almost as well. He was an all-state basketball player in high school. At Stanford, after giving up football for two years, he tried out for the team last fall as a junior. His plunging power and breakaway speed (his 96-yd. kickoff run-back against U.S.C. sparked Stanford to the Pacific Coast championship) prompted veteran Coach Pop Warner, who coached both Thorpe and Ernie Nevers, to say: "Mathias is the closest thing to a miracle worker I've seen in 60 years." After a few rounds of golf, Bob already shoots in the low 80s.
Sunday Track Meet. Bob's athletic prowess is not entirely an accident of birth. His father, a onetime University of Oklahoma all-state football player, is a general practitioner and Tulare's high-school team doctor. The whole Mathias household has always been dedicated to athletics. Brother Eugene, 24, was a promising high-school football star until his career was cut short by a concussion; Jimmy, 18, is an up & coming decathloner (he finished 19th in the nationals); Patricia, 15, the family hopes, will be an Olympic swimmer in 1956.
Almost from infancy Bob had an amazing sense of coordination. "He never fell off chairs or ran into things," Dr. Mathias noted. When eight-year-old brother Gene began bringing his friends home to play ball, they tried to shunt five-year-old Bob aside. But they soon discovered their mistake. "The older kids noticed that Bob threw the ball harder than they couldand could catch it better," Mrs. Mathias recalls. "So Robert [the family all call him that] made the 'team' even back then. We knew we had an athlete on our hands."
The Mathias backyard in those days was hopping with juvenile athletes. "Morning, afternoon and night," says Mrs. Mathias, "it seemed that a track meet was going on in our backyard. On Sundays the parents would come over and watch their children compete. Ours was one home that never had a gardenjust a garden of kids."
In the eighth grade, at the age of 12½, Bob entered his first real track meet. He high-jumped 5 ft. 6 in. The same day, Gene was competing in a high-school meet, where the winning height was 5 ft. 5 in. "There just wasn't much doubt about it," Mrs. Mathias says, "the boy was beginning to get awfully good."
In high-school track (1945-48), Bob won 40 first places and broke 21 records. He was only a fair student. When he came home once with a rare "A" on his report card, he grinned self-consciously: "Well, Mom, I guess I'm a grind now." There was nothing mediocre about his growing athletic record. As a football fullback he averaged almost nine yards a carry. Tulareans have it that one team didn't even try to stop him: "They just let him through, peaceful like." In basketball, in his senior year, he averaged 18 points a game. In the West Coast relays in 1947, he won the shot, discus and high hurdles, tied for second in the high jump and ran the anchor leg on Tulare's winning relay team.