“Bullet Bob” Hayes Wins Lone Shot At NCAAs

Bob Hayes might have only appeared once at the NCAA Track & Field Outdoor Championships, but he certainly made that opportunity count 56 years ago.

Hayes, who competed for Florida A&M, toed the starting line of the 200 meters alongside seven men who had grandeur visions of taking down the World’s Fastest Man. That’s not a typo: Hayes was the only man in world history to that point to run 100 yards in 9.1 (He actually did so four times, with one mark ratified as the world record).

Fast running began in the semifinals with 20.3 wins from both Hayes and Edwin Roberts from North Carolina Central, who edged 1962 winner Harry Jerome from host Oregon. The times were wind-aided but second only under any conditions to the world record (20.2).

Hayes took immediate control of the final, running “the curve faster, probably, than it has ever been run as he went all out to open a 3-yard lead,” wrote Cordner Nelson, co-founder of Track & Field News. Despite the lead, Hayes nearly got caught as Roberts closed exceptionally well.

Hayes and Roberts were both credited with finishing times of 20.4w, but the former earned the victory by a whisker. It was the fifth time in the past six years that the final was too close to call.

“I made a mistake,” Hayes explained afterwards. “I lost two tenths looking at the wrong line. I dove at the tape and actually it wasn’t even a tape.”

Later that year, Hayes won a pair of gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics, cementing his place among historians as perhaps the best sprinter ever. He tied the world record of 10.06 in his 100-meter victory and then anchored the Americans to victory in the 4×100 relay with a scintillating hand-timed split between 8.5-8.9 seconds.

His future thereafter was in football, where he starred with the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys from 1965-1974 – winning a Super Bowl with them in 1971 – and then with the San Francisco 49ers in 1975. He caught 371 passes for 7,414 yards and 71 touchdowns and was finally inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2009.

Hayes’ prowess in football and track & field is unmatched, as the only athlete with both an Olympic gold medal and a Super Bowl ring, while he and Jim Thorpe are the only Pro Football Hall of Fame members with an Olympic gold medal.