Herb Douglas, an Olympic medalist who was impressed as a youth by Jesse Owens, emulated him as a observe and discipline star after which honored his reminiscence by creating a world sports activities award in Owens’s identify, died on Saturday in Pittsburgh. He was 101 and the oldest dwelling U.S. Olympic medalist.
The College of Pittsburgh introduced his dying, at an prolonged care facility. Douglas was a graduate of the college and had served on its board of trustees.
Douglas was 14 when he met Owens in September 1936, quickly after Owens received 4 gold medals on the Berlin Olympics, shattering, as a Black man, Hitler’s hopes of utilizing the Video games as a showcase for Aryan supremacy. Owens was talking at a faculty in Pittsburgh, the place Douglas lived. Douglas’s mom, Ilessa Might France Douglas, had taken him to the occasion.
“When Jesse was leaving the auditorium,” Douglas recalled, “I used to be standing close to the door. I advised him that I ran observe in junior highschool, did 21 toes 8 inches within the lengthy bounce, ran 100 yards in 10.4 and high-jumped 6 toes. He advised me that was higher than he did at my age, and ‘sustain the nice work.’”
Douglas did. On the subsequent Summer season Video games, in London in 1948 — the 1940 and 1944 Olympics have been canceled due to World Battle II — he received the bronze medal within the broad bounce, now generally known as the lengthy bounce, clearing 24 toes 9 inches. (Willie Steele, one other American, received with 25 toes 8 inches.)
When Douglas’s profession as a gross sales supervisor and govt within the beer and liquor industries started, he usually traveled via Chicago, the place Owens lived, and would phone Owens.
“We talked each week for 20 years till he died in 1980,” Douglas mentioned. “I felt I ought to do one thing to memorialize his profession. I all the time tried to mimic him. He was a giving man.”
In 1980, Douglas based the Worldwide Beginner Athletic Affiliation, which till 2001 staged an annual black-tie dinner to profit the Jesse Owens Basis and the USA Olympic Committee. Douglas was the affiliation’s first president and later president emeritus.
Every year, the affiliation offered its showpiece, the Jesse Owens Worldwide Trophy Award, for athletic excellence and humanitarianism. The winners have included the lengthy jumper Carl Lewis, the hurdler Edwin Moses, the sprinters Michael Johnson and Florence Griffith Joyner, the middle-distance runner Mary Decker Slaney, the diver Greg Louganis and the speedskater Eric Heiden — all gold medal-winning Olympians.
In 1993, Douglas added a Jesse Owens World Award for Peace, offered each two years to a world chief with a sports activities background. Among the many winners have been Nelson Mandela; Kofi Annan, the previous secretary common of the United Nations; Juan Antonio Samaranch, the previous head of the Worldwide Olympic Committee; and the cable tv pioneer Ted Turner.
The awards and dinners continued into the early 2000s, and Douglas was happy with their contribution to racial understanding. On the ceremony in 1995, Douglas recalled, “Jesse used to say, ‘All of us got here right here on completely different boats, but when all of us don’t row collectively, America will sink.’ I’m going to do all I can to maintain it afloat.”
Herbert Paul Douglas Jr. was born on March 9, 1922, in Pittsburgh and was raised there. His father ran an car restore enterprise. Herb Jr. graduated from Taylor Allderdice Excessive College in Pittsburgh and attended Xavier College of Louisiana earlier than transferring to the College of Pittsburgh on a scholarship as a soccer halfback. He and Jimmy Joe Robinson have been the staff’s first African American gamers.
“I don’t imply to be conceited,” Douglas as soon as mentioned, “however nobody may cowl me after I went out for a move. The one downside was we didn’t have a quarterback to get me the ball.”
Douglas, who graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in bodily training in 1948, described school as an onerous place for Black athletes on the time.
“We have been harassed on campus,” he mentioned. “We have been positively referred to as derogatory names by gamers on opposing groups. I performed one yr for Clark Shaughnessy. The subsequent yr, Wes Fesler was the coach. He advised me to overlook soccer. He mentioned I had a future in observe, so I caught with observe.”
He earned a grasp’s diploma in training from the college in 1950.
He’s survived by his spouse, Minerva (Brice) Douglas; his daughter, Barbara Ralston; 4 grandchildren; and a number of other great-grandchildren. His son, Herbert P. Douglas III, died final yr.
Within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties, Douglas labored in advertising as a salesman and govt for the Pabst Brewing Firm. He then joined Schieffelin & Firm, later Schieffelin & Somerset Firm, which imported wine, Champagne and brandy. When he retired in 1987, he was vice chairman for city market improvement. He remained as a marketing consultant till 1993.
In his later years, he additionally served as govt producer of “The Renaissance Interval of the African American in Sports activities,” a 2014 documentary movie concerning the Black athletes on the 1936 Olympics.
When Douglas received his Olympic medal, the primary by a Pittsburgh native, he gave it to his mom. Nearly every day, she took it from its place on her living-room wall and wore it, hoping individuals would ask about it. They did.
When she died in 1996, he positioned the medal in her coffin.
Frank Litsky, a longtime sportswriter for The Occasions, died in 2018. Alex Traub contributed reporting.
