Billy Brown

Sport: Track and Field

Induction Year: 1969

University: LSU

Induction Year: 1969

On July 4, 1936, young Billy Brown wasn’t worried about the hop, step and jump competition in the national AAU track and field championships at Princeton, N.J.

Brown, who had just completed his junior year at Baker, La., High School, wasn’t overconfident about his chances to qualify for the United States Olympic team that would compete in Berlin later that summer. The reason he wasn’t concerned about the competition was that he didn’t intend to jump in the meet.

He went to New Jersey for the junior AAU championships, held one day before the senior meet, and needed special permission to enter the junior meet. Because of a bout with the mumps, he had missed a qualifying meet in New Orleans.

Thanks to the intervention of U.S. Olympic coach Lawson Robertson, Brown was allowed to jump in the junior meet. He was second in the broad jump (now called the long jump) and first in the hop, step and jump (triple jump).

The following day, Loyola coach Tad Gormley spotted Brown in the bleachers and called him down to the track.

“You should be jumping today,” Gormley told him. “When you won the hop, step and jump, you automatically qualified for the senior meet.”

So Brown went into the dressing room, put on his track togs again and won the gold medal—beating the meet record-holder and defending champion, Rolland Romero of Loyola, by four inches. At the age of 17, Brown was the youngest athlete ever to win a flat jumping event in the national championships—and the youngest member of the 1936 U.S. Olympic track and field team.

Dudley Wilkins of Southwestern Louisiana Institute was third, giving Louisiana athletes a 1-2-3 sweep.

Brown’s victory over Romero was no fluke. The previous December, he beat Gormley and Sol Furth of New York (who had finished in the top four in the national meet four times in the previous six years) in the Sugar Bowl track meet.

In the strictly regimented Olympics, Brown wasn’t able to properly warm up and didn’t make the finals in the Berlin Games. But the following year, he won the national AAU title again with a leap of 49 feet, 7 ¼ inches that stood as a national interscholastic record for 26 years.

In state high school rallies, Brown won four events three years in a row. Although Baker High was a small school (and didn’t have a football team at that time), all schools were in the same division in 1935 and 1936. When they were divided into classes in 1937, Brown had enough points (20) to win the team title by himself. (Two teammates had three apiece for a 26-18 margin over runner-up Summerfield.)

Brown also excelled in basketball at Baker High, and was a promising centerfielder on summer baseball teams—playing with the town team and a Baton Rouge American Legion team. His track coach for his first two years was John East, who had been a Southern conference high jump champion at LSU. Marvin Sacharie took over the reins in Brown’s senior year, but Brown coached himself in the month between the end of his junior season and the Olympic Trials.

He set state high school records in both the triple jump and long jump. The triple jump record stood for 32 years, until Spencer Thomas of Carver (New Orleans) became the state’s first prep 50-footer in 1969. Brown’s long jump record of 24 feet, 8 ¼ inches stood until Don Troutman of Roanoke leaped 24-11 in 1956.

It was more of the same at LSU, where Brown set school records in four evens with 25-7 in the long jump, 50-11 ½ in the triple jump, 9.5 in the 100 yard dash and 20.5 in the 220 yard dash. He won seven individual titles in Southeastern Conference meets and led Coach Bernie Moore’s Tigers to three consecutive SEC championships. In both of his last two years, Brow was the leading scorer in the NCAA championships. LSU finished in the top five both years with Brown scoring all of the team’s points—22 in 1940 and 24 in 1941.

In 1941, he became the first triple winner in the history of the SEC meet. The same year he won the NCAA long jump title. Brown probably would’ve won the previous year, too, but miserable weather in Minneapolis forced NCAA officials to move the long jump indoors. Brown had never competed indoors, and didn’t have the proper shoes. But he still finished second to future baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson of UCLA.

In three years of competition in the Drake Relays, where the traditional prizes for first place were wrist watches, Brown won the long jump three times and the 100 once. He had no trouble keeping up with the time.

National AAU secretary-treasurer Dan Ferris selected Brown on five All-America teams—two while he was in high school and three during his college career. These teams, it should be noted, included only one athlete in each event. As a high school senior, Brown made an All-America team that had no athletes from the SEC and only two (Rice hurdlers Fred Wolcott and Jack Patterson) from the Southwest Conference.

Before Brown arrived at LSU, only football players were allowed to eat at the training table. Moore was happy to make an exception for a freshman who had already won two national championships.

In national AAU meets, Brown won the triple jump six times and the long jump twice. He also placed third and fourth in the 100 two years in a row.

He set the American record in the triple jump in the 1941 AAU meet with a leap of 50 feet 11 ½ inches. That was an especially remarkable achievement considering the fact that the event wasn’t held in college meets and Brown trained for it only for a week or two each year before he went to the national AAU meet.

He enlisted in the Navy after graduating from LSU and represented the Navy when he won his final AAU title in 1943.

The 6-3, 175-pound stringbean was the tallest world class sprinter until the mid-1960s. He placed in SEC meets in the high jump with a best of 6-3, and was good enough in the pole vault and weight events to be considered a strong contender for the decathlon.

“Those who saw Billy Brown close out his SEC career should deem it a great privilege,” wrote Birmingham News sports editor Zipp Newman after the 1941 SEC meet. “Few in the audience will hardly ever look upon another athlete in Brown’s class.”