“Rodney didn’t care whose ass he was whuppin’, he just loved whuppin’ ass.” –Charles Foster
A funny thing happened in Southern’s first home meet in 1971. Rodney ran a pedestrian time of 14.1. He didn’t understand why. There was no headwind, no rain. The tartan track felt soft and firm beneath his spiked shoes. The race felt quick. More like a 13.6 or 13.7. Something had to be wrong. Walking back to gather his warm-up clothes, he noticed where the timers were standing. The finish line was too far back. Rodney had run 127 yards.
Another spring had arrived. The pain of last year’s AAU meltdown had faded, but the desire to redeem himself had increased. He had spent the winter months training. With no races. If it had been up to Rodney, he would’ve been running indoor meets all winter long. But Dick Hill, back from graduate school, decided that Rodney needed to address his technical flaws before battling the likes of Willie, Tom Hill, and Marcus Walker again. He also declared that Rodney needed to build up his late-race strength, so he had him running over-distance. Rodney hated over-distance. He was a sprint hurdler, not a distance hurdler. He wanted to be an indoor champion, and Hill was preventing that from happening.
Rodney had no idea why Hill was keeping him out of races. At the time, Bert Nelson of Track and Field News wrote: “Rodney saw Davenport taking off every weekend and returning with prizes and stories to tell, and he wanted some of the action.” Why was Hill making Rodney run quarter-miles in practice? Would these workouts help him to hurdle faster? “The one thing I most dislike about track is running the quarter,” Rodney said in the T&FN article. But Hill had him running quarters almost every day.
Accustomed to Paxton’s improvisational approach to coaching, Rodney neither liked nor grasped Hill’s more detail-oriented style. Hill told Nelson, “My philosophy is that in the technical area of the hurdles, a guy has to have a scientific background, so when they approach the level Rodney is at now, you can talk about things that are highly critical with the terminology you need to use. There are a lot of terms I use that he wasn’t able to grasp during the turbulent time we ran into.” Rodney wasn’t stupid. But technical jargon didn’t appeal to him. Hearing it made him suspicious. He had grown so comfortable with Paxton as a mentor that he wasn’t sure he could trust Hill the same way. Did Hill have his best interests in mind? Or was he one of these coaches who was just looking to pad his resume?
But Hill’s credentials were beyond question. He had coached two gold medalists. Paxton and Willie advised Rodney to have faith in Hill, so Rodney tried, despite his own misgivings. Since Rodney wasn’t running races, he had no way to be sure Hill’s method’s were working. Did his coach not have confidence in him? “Rod more or less felt he was being put down,” Hill said. “He realized his great potential, and I realized it too, but I didn’t want him to just go out there and start trying to prove greatness when he still had all these flaws.”
Rodney also had to accept that he was a member of a team. Willie wasn’t. He could set his own schedule. As good as Rodney was, he had to put the team first. “He and I talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages of the team being just average while he was great,” Hill said. He had to subordinate a lot of his own personal desires for the benefit of the team.”
In this photo from the 1971 Southern University Yearbook, Milburn pulls away from Davenport in a battle over the 110m high hurdles.
Hill recognized Rodney’s work ethic, and knew their mutual efforts would pay off shortly. “Rodney is very coachable,” Hill told Frank Litsky, “because he is willing to pay the price. What he has done is a reflection of that.” Hill also compared Rodney favorably to his first Olympic champion, Bob Hayes. “Both realized they had awesome power, but neither sat back. Both thrived on competition. As the competition got better, they got better.”
May 16, 1971 was the first day Rodney beat Willie in a hurdles race. On a cold, damp, drizzly afternoon at the Martin Luther King Games in Philadelphia, Rodney ran a wind-aided 13.2 for the victory. Willie finished third in 13.5. Tommy White of Southern California snuck in for second in 13.4. For Rodney, the triumph over Willie marked a turning point similar to the Meet of Champions victory after his senior year of high school.
“After that race,” Rodney told T&FN, “I knew I could run a 13.2 anytime, with or without a wind. It was just a question of how much faster I could go. My goal when I got out of high school was to at least tie the world record. It wasn’t until after Philadelphia that I started thinking I could go all the way.”
Hill agreed, noting that Rodney’s 13.4 in the prelims came so easily, it didn’t even look fast. Then after he beat Willie, “he realized that he was strong,” Hill said. “His whole attitude seemed to change because he started noticing the benefits that he was achieving. He became inquisitive and very interested in what we were trying to do.” Hill admitted, though, that “if Rodney had fallen flat on his face in that meet he might have questioned a lot of things I was doing.”
All the quarters Hill made Rodney run gave him the endurance to maintain form over all ten hurdles. Before, when he would work only on his speed, start, and lead leg, his technique would get very sloppy toward the end of a race. Now, the tenth hurdle was looking as good as the first.
To Willie, the inevitable had finally happened. “It felt bad to lose,” he said. “I had to tell Rodney he was the greatest. But I was happy to congratulate him after the race.”
Larry Shipp, who would enter LSU two years later and run against Rodney and Willie, was a high school junior at the time, watching the race from the stands. The duel between the two rivals, and their mutual sportsmanship, left an impression on him. “One of the most heart-warming things I saw,” he said, “was when Rodney beat Willie, and Willie gives him the biggest hug you’ve ever seen. Here I was a young guy; I had always been taught to have that boxer’s mentality. But here was Willie showing me that you could be a warrior without hating your opponent. It teaches you a lesson. You go out, you work hard, you compete.”
The magnitude of Rodney’s victory was enormous. “No one ever really heard of him before then,” Shipp said. “The dominant hurdler was Davenport. To see Rodney win that race and beat Willie just changed everything. At first you think it’s a fluke. Next thing you know, no, he’s just dominating.”
Rodney’s break-out win was overshadowed by a duel between Marty Liquori of Villanova and Jim Ryun of Kansas in the “dream mile.” Newspaper headlines the next day focused on the two middle-distance runners. Both finished in an astounding 3:54.6, but Liquori was credited with the victory. In the wire service article that appeared across the country, the epic battle between Liquori and Ryun was described in detail, including mile splits and quotes from both athletes. Rodney’s defeat of Willie was mentioned in a short paragraph at the bottom. It wouldn’t be the last time that a brilliant performance of Rodney’s would go virtually unnoticed.
But he was moving up in the hurdling ranks. Prior to the King Games, he had won at the prestigious Drake Relays in Iowa, setting a new meet record of 13.5. Meanwhile, Marcus Walker and Tom Hill were falling off the map. Both had incurred injuries that threatened their careers. Walker, sadly, was never able to return to his old form. “I pulled a muscle in my hamstring,” he said years later, “and I didn’t wait long enough for it to heal. I just came back too soon, and it just caused more of a problem than anything. I developed a hematoma in the bone of the muscle, and that was it for me.”
Walker managed to get in a couple races before his disaster struck, but Hill missed the entire season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee before the outdoor season even started. “I get a little depressed about it,” he said at the time. “I really don’t know what will happen and I just hope I’ll be able to run well again.”
The injuries of the world’s two top-ranked hurdlers from 1970 opened the door even wider for Rodney. At the California Relays in Modesto during the last weekend in May, Rodney beat Willie and Tommy White again. The win itself wasn’t a big deal, but how he won it was. He got out slow and was having trouble settling into a rhythm. Then he clobbered the third hurdle and almost fell. The rest of the field flew past him. “The first thing that hit me,” he told T&FN, “was that I had lost it. Then I figured I’d better get going, and I went on at it.” His time of 13.5 was nothing spectacular, but, as Coach Hill said, “I felt I’d just seen him run his worst race ever and still win. That was a pretty good indication that bigger things were on the way.”
At the NAIA championships the following week in Billings, Montana, he turned out a stunning but wind-aided 13.0 to win by four tenths of a second over Ron Draper of North Carolina Central. Wind-aided or not, it was the fastest sprint hurdle race ever run. There could be no doubt that Rodney was ready to challenge the world record of 13.2 set by Germany’s Martin Lauer in 1959. “I felt then,” Coach Hill said, “it was just a matter of time when the legal 13-flat would take place.”
The meteoric rise that Willie had predicted was coming true. Rodney was growing more consistent with his hurdling technique. As the victories piled up, his confidence soared. He stayed humble and mild-mannered, but the change in attitude showed in his appearance. Throughout high school and his first year at Southern, he had kept his afro haircut neatly trimmed and shaped. Now he let it grow out. Sometimes he added a part in the middle so that half of the afro swung to one side, and the other half swung to the other. In races, he often added a headband to the look. He also let his sideburns grow, abandoning the clean-shaven look of his “Dice” days. “He had all the self-confidence after the Modesto meet,” Coach Hill said. “He even talked like it then.”
“That’s when we started calling him Hot Rod,” Leon Coleman said, “because we never knew when he was gonna put the rod on us.” Rodney didn’t talk trash to his opponents, but he played subtle mind games with them. Always one to go off by himself in the moments leading up to a race, this habit started to get into his opponents’ heads. “You wouldn’t see him until the starter said strip down,” Charles Foster said. “Then he’d show up. He’d just appear from behind the bleachers. You’d think he’s not coming, and then there he is.” Maybe Rodney chose to materialize out of the blue because he was growing annoyed with Willie’s habit of running off at the mouth. Rodney was starting to beat him regularly, but that didn’t lessen Willie’s swagger. Nothing, really, could affect Willie’s confidence. “Willie was the kind of guy,” Tom Hill said, “who felt he could beat your butt any day of the week.”
In this photo from Track & Field News, Coleman, Davenport, and Milburn view a playback of their race.
More than anyone, Willie could see that Rodney was becoming a superior hurdler. He trained with him. He saw how hard Rodney worked, and knew that Rodney practiced harder than he did himself. Dr. Raymond Lockett, a history professor at Southern who assisted with the track team in the early ‘70s, noted that “Willie never trained. He’d come out and go over two hurdles and that’s it.” Willie already had a gold medal around his neck, so he wasn’t nearly as hungry for Olympic success. “He worked,” Dick Hill said, “but not on the same level as Rodney.” But he was so highly skilled and such a tremendous competitor that he remained a constant threat. Before races, he liked to chatter at Rodney to break his concentration. “They’d jaw-jack back and forth all the time,” Foster said.
But Rodney wasn’t letting trash-talk get to him. He was a master at shutting out distractions and focusing on the task at hand. “I’ve usually got butterflies prior to a meet,” he told The Advocate of Baton Rouge. “I’m pretty tense, but that’s good. It makes me run better. It helps me get up for a race. When getting ready for a meet I try to put everything else out of my mind. I think about each opponent individually. And I always like to think positively. That’s the only way I think. Once the gun sounds, I’m all right.” With his sideburns, afro, headband, well-defined muscles, and explosive double-armed hurdling style, he was an intimidating figure. People didn’t want to run against him. And there was nobody he was afraid to run against. “He was just takin’ names,” Foster said. “He didn’t care whose ass he was whuppin’, he just loved whuppin’ ass.”
Rodney and Coach Hill were pleased with the improvements, and credited them to their training sessions. Of course, because Rodney was heading toward a number-one world ranking, everyone wanted to know the secret to his success. “I believe the key is my start,” Rodney said. “I have a good, quick start. Then I build up momentum between the hurdles. As a freshman, I ran mostly off of strategy. My technique wasn’t down. Now I can control my arm better, my trail leg is much quicker, and I stay down on the hurdles closer. I don’t hit them as often.”
Hill was more analytical in his assessment: “He’s developed a tremendous amount of technique in terms of lead leg, trail leg coordination, lift coming off the hurdles, use of the arms, and the sprint between the hurdles.” Predictably, Hill saw more room for progress. “Rod still has a few rough spots,” he said. “We definitely have to get rid of his lateral movement, and his left arm coordination is not exactly perfected. But he has overcome these deficiencies by having an overwhelming amount of strength and speed.”
Rodney was getting to know his body better. As part of his studies for a physical education degree, he took a physiology class. It helped him understand how the systems within the body function and interrelate. Based on his discoveries, he developed a new warm-up routine that involved more stretching and jogging than the one he used during his J.S. Clark days. Back then, he would just blast over the hurdles at full speed instead of building up gradually. Now he was warming up for 45 minutes before he even took off his sweat pants. “Every muscle needs to be loose,” he said. “Hurdlers usually do more warm-up exercises than other participants in order to get the blood circulating good.”
Leading up to the AAU championships at the end of June, he took on more of the college ranks, moving beyond the tiny schools of the NAIA. First came the NCAA College Division national meet in Sacramento. He ran a 13.5 into a fierce headwind, winning handily over Draper, yet again providing hope that, under the right conditions, the world record would fall. Next came the NCAA University Division in Seattle. Here he faced athletes from all the major conferences around the country. He and Draper finished 1-2 again. Unphased by the Notre Dames and UCLAs of the world, Rodney ran 13.5 in the prelims and semis, then finished things off with a smooth and easy 13.6 in the finals, slowing down at the tape.
With Walker and Tom Hill on the shelf, Rodney was the clear-cut favorite at the AAU championships in Eugene, Oregon. Other contenders were Tommy White, Lance Babb, and Jerry Wilson, all of USC. Then there was Draper, and of course, Willie, who presented the stiffest challenge because of his proven ability to exceed expectations in big races. Draper had finished second to Rodney in just about every race they had run, so there was always the possibility he could come up with an upset. White, too, had lost a couple close ones to Rodney. In American hurdling, old faces might die out, new ones might replace them, but the level of competition always stayed the same. Even with Walker and Tom Hill gone, Rodney would have to run a near-flawless race if he expected to win.
“Whatcha gonna do today Hot Rod? 13.3 won’t beat Willie D. Gonna have to go 13.2, 13.1. I ain’t givin’ ya nothin’ for free.” Willie was being his usual boisterous self. The thinner air of Eugene didn’t seem to tire his lungs. Maybe he was used to it from Mexico City. The only thing Rodney knew was he didn’t feel like hearing him. “You ain’t gonna beat me,” he said. Willie laughed, but he didn’t respond. Their semi-final heat was stacked. Making the finals wasn’t a lock. Wilson, Babb, Dick Taylor of Northwestern, and ’68 silver medalist Erv Hall joined Willie and Rodney at the starting line.
Rodney blasted out of the blocks and took command of the race. He never looked back until he broke the tape in a world record time of 13.0. Willie also qualified for the final, coming in three tenths behind Rodney in 13.3. Wilson, Babb, and Taylor all crossed the line in 13.4, with Hall’s 13.6 good only for sixth and a seat in the bleachers. The Eugene fans, famous for their knowledge and enthusiasm, roared their approval when the world record announcement came over the loudspeaker. Rodney smiled and waved. He felt elated to have broken the record, but still had more work to do.
In the final, he sped to another easy victory in a wind-aided 13.1. Draper nipped Willie for second, 13.3 to 13.4. Babb finished fourth, also in 13.4. Tommy White, who had finished second to Draper in their semi-final heat, hit a hurdle early and didn’t complete the race.
It was a glorious day for Rodney. The Eugene crowd gave him a standing ovation as he jogged a victory lap. Only their local hero, distance runner Steve Prefontaine, received a larger ovation. In the three-mile run, Prefontaine, spurred on by his fanatical hometown fans, willed himself to a dashing, daring triumph over big-named rivals Frank Shorter and Gerry Lindgren.
Now there was no question that Rodney was king of the high hurdles. He wasn’t just winning, he was dominating. He had swept the three collegiate championships, and then topped it off with an emphatic performance in Eugene. He had smashed a twelve-year-old record by a full two tenths, leaving many to wonder if he could go even faster.
Said Willie immediately after the finals: “I wasn’t surprised by the 13-flat. I predicted he’d run 12.8. Milburn can run a 12.7 and that 13.0 won’t last as long as a snow-cone.” Willie also hinted that the student had become the master: “I still help him and he still has some flaws, but I learn things from him now too.”
Surprisingly, with the wind at his back, Rodney didn’t run sub-13 in the finals. “My best times come in the trials,” he told Frank Litsky. “I’m more relaxed. I don’t like the pressure of a final. In my 13.0, everything went nice all the way. I even eased up over the last hurdle.” Describing the race to the Daily World years later, he said he felt “just like a ballet dancer out there going through the routines. I had so much finesse I could almost stand on top of the hurdle.”
Rodney had risen to the level of superstar. He was the greatest high hurdler in the world, maybe even in history. And he was arguably the best track athlete in the world. He had yet to lose a race all season. He could no longer go anywhere without someone recognizing him, asking for an autograph, encouraging him to break 13-flat, wishing him well in his quest for Olympic gold.
Although he tried to remain calm and approachable through it all, he had trouble adapting to his sudden fame. He viewed himself as the same ordinary guy he had always been. He’d been winning races all his life. Why should winning them now change anything? Because, as Litsky pointed out, “He was a bright new star, a modest hero whom fans could respect and admire and cheer.”
Being a Southern gentleman played a big role in Rodney’s increasing national popularity. He didn’t go out of his way to make anyone like him, but the public saw him as a refreshing contrast to the militant black sports heroes of the 1960s. You didn’t have to worry about Rodney Milburn raising a black-gloved fist to the sky. Still, he had the respect of blacks because of the adversity he had overcome in making it this far. Plus he was good friends with many of the “rebels” from the ’68 Olympics, like Willie and Leon Coleman. And he had the respect of whites because he carried himself with dignity.
As he told Litsky, “I’m a fairly easy person to get along with. I guess I’m happy. But I don’t enjoy being a celebrity. Everybody pressures me. I want to get away from people. Since I set my world record, I won’t even go to basketball games at school.”
Clearly, Rodney didn’t have the charismatic personality of a Muhammad Ali, a Wilt Chamberlain, or even a Willie Davenport. If anything, fame made him even more reclusive. He suspected the motives of people who praised him without knowing him. He felt most comfortable when visiting family and friends in Opelousas during holidays and breaks, or when hanging out with Willie and his track teammates.
The only outside admirers he trusted were kids. At Southern’s home meets, he spent hours after races signing autographs and talking with them. He liked going to local high school meets in Baton Rouge and watching the young athletes compete. Occasionally he attended their practices and offered instruction on the basics of sprinting and hurdling.
Rodney wasn’t a typical college student. Besides being a star athlete, he was married. He and his wife Carolyn had known each other since childhood. They tied the knot early in Rodney’s freshman year at Southern. They lived in separate dorms at first, but now they were staying together in on-campus housing reserved for married students. Rodney spent most of his time away from the track with Carolyn. No partying, no drinking. Those kinds of pastimes didn’t appeal to him. He didn’t join a fraternity. The Greek tradition may have been a staple of social life at black colleges, but Rodney wasn’t a fraternity kind of guy. As Litsky wrote, “When people aren’t bugging him, Milburn is relaxed. He is soft-spoken, shy, and not excitable. He smiles easily. He talks easily with friends, not quite so easily with strangers.”
The strangers he trusted least were reporters. Perhaps he opened up to Litsky because that interview was for Boys’ Life, a kids’ magazine. But it was not in Rodney’s nature to speak openly with sportswriters. “He was one of the more taciturn athletes that I ever met,” said Bob Hersh of T&FN. “I once had to interview him and it was not the easiest interview in the world.”
In his own quiet way, Rodney was an idealist. He was a dreamer. If any cultural movement from the ‘60s stayed with him into the ‘70s, it was not the spirit of revolution, but the spirit of peace and love. At the top of his list of favorite musical groups was the Fifth Dimension. Their hit, “Aquarius,” was an astrological anthem celebrating the vision of a shift into a new age of spirit consciousness. An age of “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding.” Rodney believed in that vision, and he studied astrology intently. He did so on his own, outside the classroom.
“Astrology is very interesting,” he told The Advocate. “It makes everything seem so real. I’ve got a whole set of books on astrology. I feel like many of the readings concern me in some way and I believe it reveals something about your future.” When asked by Litsky’s eleven-year-old son to identify the thing he would ask for if granted one wish, Rodney answered simply, “Everybody should live forever.”
Not your typical college student. Not your typical world-class athlete.
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Unlike in 1970, Rodney’s season continued after the AAU meet. He didn’t travel to Europe, but faced international competition on domestic soil. He ran two races in July. Against Russia, then against Africa two weeks later. He won both races handily. Draper finished second in each race. Rodney closed out the season with another victory at the Pan-American Games in California the first weekend of August. He won by a wide-enough margin that he was looking back at his opponents as he crossed the finish line. “Just wanted to see where they were,” he said.
Rodney’s 1971 was one of the greatest campaigns ever for a track athlete. He didn’t lose a race. Including the 127-yard mistake, he won 29 straight races in total, including 16 finals. “To win even three races in a row is incredible,” Shipp said, “because those other hurdlers don’t go into a race thinking, ‘I’m going for second place today.’ When you have that type of attitude coming after you and you can win more than twenty in a row, that’s something you’re not supposed to be able to do.”
The accolades Rodney received at season’s end included some of the most prestigious available. Track & Field News, in its annual year-end issue, named Rodney its Athlete of the Year. He was the first hurdler to ever receive this honor. Of course, the magazine also rated him as the #1 ranked hurdler in the world.
Locally, Rodney won the Jim Corbett award, given to the best amateur athlete in Louisiana. The award had been in existence since 1965; Rodney was its first black recipient. In Opelousas, August 28th was designated Rodney Milburn Day. It was the first time the town had ever organized a special day to honor a black citizen.
That morning at City Hall, dressed in a button-down shirt, sports coat, and pin-striped slacks, Rodney autographed pictures for kids and shook hands with many politicians. After breakfast came a parade and Rodney’s acceptance speech. The breakfast, parade, and ceremony were attended by blacks and whites.
Rodney signs autographs on Rodney Milburn Day in his hometown of Opelousas, LA.
“The white people here,” his sister Lillie said in 2005, “they really loved Rodney. They loved to put on a show that they loved him and cared about him. I think they really respected him because he was a good person.”
Rodney’s appeal, certainly, was his quiet nature. “He was good people,” long-time local resident Gil Deville said in 2005. “They’re all good people, that whole family. This was a man who was brought up with good manners, had a good reputation in the community. Very polite, very well-reared.”
Rodney had crossed the racial divide. The only thing left now was to win a gold medal.
© 2010 Steve McGill