George Kimball: Thirty-eight years later it remains the highlight of any Olympic film: when he took the baton from Dick Stebbins for the anchor leg in the 4x100 metres relay final, the US sat in fifth place. Bob Hayes, who had already won the 100 metres gold medal in Tokyo, proceeded to run down the anchormen of Jamaica, Russia, Poland, and France over that final straight to win.
Hayes was clocked at 8.6 seconds for his 100 metres split, which was later described, accurately, as "the most astonishing sprint of all time". (Okay, he had the benefit of a running start, but consider when Tim Montgomery broke the world record for the distance in Paris last week, his time was 9.78 seconds.) The 39.06 time for the US team in that relay shattered the world record by half a second.
Watching in the stands in Tokyo that day was Jesse Owens, the 1936 American Olympic hero, who was seated with Hayes's mother.
"Jesse told me 'you go out there and run, and we'll take care of your Mom'," Hayes reminisced in his hometown newspaper two months ago. "When (Emperor) Hirohito put that medal around my neck, all I could think about was here's this kid from the ghetto, from the 'hood, standing with the highest level of a foreign government. Then I looked up at the stands and saw my Mom with tears in her eyes. It's my best Olympic memory."
And the Olympics may not even have been the highlight of Hayes's athletic career. I was there at Tulane Stadium eight years later when Hayes helped the Dallas Cowboys defeat the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VI.
When they buried Bob Hayes in Jacksonville, Florida, yesterday, he went to his grave the only man to have won both Olympic gold medals and a Super Bowl ring.
"A lot of track guys give football a shot, but Bob is the only one who really did anything with it," Hayes's old Dallas team-mate Calvin Hill recalled to a Jacksonville newspaper last week. "My old track coach at Yale wasn't given to hyperbole, but he said what he saw in that final leg of the '64 Olympic relay, you may never see again."
Hayes already held world records in the 100 and 220-yard dashes, as well as in the indoor 70, when he prepared for his senior football season at Florida A&M. At the behest of the US Olympic Committee, President Lyndon B Johnson contacted Jake Gaithers, the coach at the predominantly black university, requesting he hold Hayes out of gridiron competition lest he be injured.
"Mr President, let me tell you something," Gaithers later recalled. "I carried this boy for four years, and I know. I guarantee he won't get hurt."
"How can you 'guarantee' this?" asked Johnson.
"Because Bob Hayes is a football player," replied Gaithers. "He just happens to also be the world's fastest human."
The Cowboys had drafted him before the Olympics, and his lightning speed forced a revolution in defensive concepts. More than any other man, Hayes was responsible for the development of modern-day zone coverages, simply because no defensive back alive could handle him.
In an 11-year NFL career he caught 71 touchdown passes (more than seven of the 15 wide receivers currently immortalised in the Pro Football Hall of Fame), and averaged 20 yards per catch. (Only one Hall of Famer, Miami's Paul Warfield, averaged more.) He was installed in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1976, but when his name came up for eligibility for election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1981, Hayes didn't get a sniff. Over the five-year window in which his name was on the ballot he never even made the 15-man short-list.
Voters will cite various reasons for this omission - Hayes went to only three Pro Bowls in 11 years, he had only one 100-yard receiving day in his 15 post-season appearances, and scored just one play-off touchdown - but it says here the actual reason he was shunned was that in 1979 he served 10 months in a federal penitentiary after pleading guilty to delivering narcotics to an undercover police officer.
Hayes fought his battles with drugs and alcohol, and made four trips to rehab clinics before defeating his demons. Why his personal life should disqualify him from membership in an organisation that continues to honour OJ Simpson is mystifying.
Acknowledging his drug and prison experiences "destroyed my life", Hayes went to his grave tormented by his exclusion from this final honour.
"There's a lot of pain in my heart because what I accomplished was second to none," he said in a 1999 interview in which he described himself as "an outcast".
For many years Hayes was even ostracised by the Cowboys' organisation. It was only a year ago Dallas owner Jerry Jones, aware Hayes (who had battled prostate cancer, liver and kidney problems, and undergone triple-bypass heart surgery) didn't have long to live, made him the 11th member of the Cowboys' Ring of Fame.
"I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, I'm blessed," Hayes told the crowd at his induction at Texas Stadium last September. "I played for the world's greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy."
