CAMPBELL, Milton Gray ("Milt")

(b. 9 December 1933 in Plainfield, New Jersey), Olympic decathlon champion, hurdler, and football player who is considered one of the best athletes of the twentieth century.

Campbell was the second of three children of Thomas Campbell, a construction worker, and Edith Campbell, a homemaker. He attended Emerson Primary School and Plainfield High School, where he was a scholastic All-American in football, swimming, and track. The only time he competed in wrestling, he bested the New Jersey wrestling champion in his weight class. In February 1952 Campbell appeared in his first indoor track meet at the National Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) High School Indoor Track and Field championships at Madison Square Garden in New York City. He won the sixty-yard high hurdles and the high jump in record-setting performances. He also qualified for the National AAU high-hurdles championships held that night and, running as part of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) team, placed third behind the Olympic champion, Harrison Dillard. As one of the three fastest runners in the event, Campbell traveled to London that spring with the AAU national team to participate in a meet that pitted the United States against the United Kingdom.

The Plainfield prodigy did so well in London that his high school track coach, Harold Bruguiere, asked the school's booster club to raise the $1,500 needed to send Campbell to the Olympic trials. Bruguiere's carefully laid plans called for Campbell to try both the 100-meter dash and the high hurdles at the AAU Senior Track and Field championships held at Long Beach, California, which served as the semifinal tryouts for the Olympic team. Although Campbell had competed in only three of the ten events included in the decathlon, Bruguiere also entered him in the decathlon trials held ten days later in Tulare, California. Campbell qualified for the final tryouts in the high hurdles but missed making the team when he tripped on a hurdle. When Bob Richards passed up the decathlon trials to concentrate on the pole vault for the Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, the eighteen-year-old Campbell took advantage of the opportunity by placing third in the decathlon. He was the only high school athlete to join the 1952 U.S. Olympic track and field team. In Helsinki, Campbell won a silver medal.

In September Campbell returned home to play football on his high school team, declaring, "Football is in my blood." He led the Plainfield team to an unbeaten season, scoring 140 points and winning distinction as an All-State player. Campbell ended his high school athletic career at Madison Square Garden in February 1953 by repeating as the National AAU champion in the high jump and the high hurdles. In July he competed in the National AAU Decathlon championships held in his hometown. Indiana University actively recruited Campbell, offering him a guaranteed four-year scholarship. The school seemed interested in his success, but it had several disadvantages, including the absence of a decathlon coach and a Southern tradition not wholly accepting of African-American students. He matriculated at Indiana in September 1953. On 20 March 1954, at the Eighteenth Annual Chicago Daily News Relays, Campbell placed third in the high hurdles, behind Harrison Dillard and the Big Ten champion Willard Thomson.

The following year, the six-foot, three-inch, 210-pound Campbell was used as a right halfback flanker on the Indiana University varsity football team. His competitive spirit and desire to win were of significant value to the school's football program. In his first punt runback, he sprinted seventy-seven yards for a touchdown. He was an outstanding ground gainer, pass receiver, and defensive back in 1954 and 1955. Road games at schools like the University of Missouri were difficult, however, because he was not allowed to room with the team as the result of local segregation rules. Campbell lettered in track in during 1954 and 1955, but the track coach did not take full advantage of his athletic talents. Nevertheless, he won both the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and AAU 120-yard high-hurdles titles in 1955.

After the 1955 football season Campbell dropped out of Indiana University and entered the U.S. Navy, where he was allowed to train full-time for the Olympics, without interference from school studies or the need to earn a living. Campbell expected to earn a place on the Olympic team in the high hurdles but placed fourth in the final trial for that event when he again hit a hurdle. Stunned by his failure in the hurdles, Campbell competed on 13–14 July 1956 at the National AAU Decathlon championships and Olympic trials held at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. There, for the second time, he qualified for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team with a second-place finish. At the Melbourne Olympics, the twenty-two-year-old Campbell won a gold medal with 7,937 points (or 7,565 using 1985 tables).

In 1957 Campbell continued to compete in the high hurdles on the indoor track circuit at the Chicago Daily News Relays, the Cleveland Knights of Columbus Meet, and elsewhere. He placed second in the sixty-yard high hurdles at the New York Athletic Club Indoor meet and the National AAU Indoor championships. That year, he tied the world record (13.4) in the 120-yard high hurdles. In the fall of 1957 he played professional football as a half-back with the Cleveland Browns, playing the entire nine-game season on a broken ankle. On 25 January 1958 Campbell married Barbara Mount; the couple had three children.

When the Cleveland Brown's training camp opened in 1958, Coach Paul Brown called Campbell into his office to declare his displeasure with Campbell's marriage to a white woman; he expressed his disapproval by using him sparingly during the exhibition season. When he was cut from the team, Campbell asked for, but was never given, an explanation. Campbell played football in the Canadian Football League from 1958 to 1964, for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Toronto Argonauts. After his professional football career, Campbell did community work in Plain-field and was popular as a motivational speaker. He and his wife divorced in 1980.

Campbell had a son, Milton Campbell III, born in 1994. In 2001 he ran as a Republican candidate for the New Jersey State Senate. Campbell is a charter member of the Indiana University Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame (1982) and was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1989.

Campbell, one of the best athletes of the twentieth century, is one of just twenty-four competitors ever to win the decathlon in the Olympic Games. He was a hurdler and football player who competed in the decathlon five times in his life.

Limited biographical information is found in the Indiana University Football Guide, 1954; Cecil K. Byrd and Ward W. Moore, Varsity Sports at Indiana University: A Pictorial History (1999); and Bob Hammel and Kit Klingelhoffer, The Glory of Old IU: 100 Years of Indiana Athletics (1999). The New York Times (17 Feb. 1952) and Ed Fried, "Plainfield Proud of Multi-Threat Star," Newark Sunday News (28 June 1953) are good sources of information on his high school years. His 1957 placement in the New York Athletic Club and AAU indoor meets can be found in the New York Times (17 and 24 Feb. 1957). Bob Carroll et al., eds., Total Football II: The Official Encyclopedia of the National Football League (1999), has information about Campbell's National Football League years.

Keith McClellan