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Rafer Johnson, 1960 Olympic Decathlon Champion, Dies at 86

Associated Press

   LOS ANGELES - Rafer Johnson, who won the decathlon at the 1960 Rome
   Olympics and helped subdue Robert F. Kennedy's assassin in 1968, died
   Wednesday. He was 86.

   He died at his home in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles,
   according to family friend Michael Roth. No cause of death was
   announced.

   Johnson was among the world's greatest athletes from 1955 through his
   Olympic triumph in 1960, winning a national decathlon championship in
   1956 and a silver medal at the Melbourne Olympics that same year.

   His Olympic career included carrying the U.S. flag at the 1960 Games
   and lighting the torch at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to open the
   1984 Games.

   Johnson set world records in the decathlon three different times amid a
   fierce rivalry with his UCLA teammate C.K. Yang of Taiwan and Vasily
   Kuznetsov of the former Soviet Union.

   Johnson won a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1955 while
   competing in just his fourth decathlon. At a welcome home meet
   afterward in Kingsburg, California, he set his first world record,
   breaking the mark of his childhood hero, two-time Olympic champion Bob
   Mathias.

   Devoted to Kennedy

   On June 5, 1968, Johnson was working on Kennedy's presidential campaign
   when the Democratic candidate was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador
   Hotel in Los Angeles. Johnson joined former NFL star Rosey Grier and
   journalist George Plimpton in apprehending Sirhan Sirhan moments after
   he shot Kennedy, who died the next day.

   "I knew he did everything he could to take care of Uncle Bobby at his
   most vulnerable moment," Kennedy's niece, Maria Shriver, said by phone.
   "His devotion to Uncle Bobby was pure and real. He had protected his
   friend. Even after Uncle Bobby's death he stayed close."

   Johnson later called the assassination "one of the most devastating
   moments in my life."

   Born Rafer Lewis Johnson on August 18, 1934, in Hillsboro, Texas, he
   moved to California in 1945 with his family, including his brother Jim,
   a future NFL Hall of Fame inductee. Although some sources cite
   Johnson's birth year as 1935, the family has said that is incorrect.

   They eventually settled in Kingsburg, near Fresno in the San Joaquin
   Valley. It was less than 25 miles from Tulare, the hometown of Mathias,
   who would win the decathlon at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics and prove an
   early inspiration to Johnson.

   Johnson was a standout student and played football, basketball,
   baseball and track and field at Kingsburg Joint Union High. At 6-foot-3
   and 200-plus pounds, he looked more like a linebacker than a track and
   field athlete.

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