Herb Douglas, Olympic Medalist Inspired by Jesse Owens, Dies at 101

Herb Douglas, an Olympic medalist who was impressed as a youth by Jesse Owens, emulated him as a observe and subject star after which honored his reminiscence by creating a global sports activities award in Owens’s title, died on Saturday in Pittsburgh. He was 101 and the oldest dwelling U.S. Olympic medalist.

The University 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 Games as a showcase for Aryan supremacy. Owens was talking at a faculty in Pittsburgh, the place Douglas lived. Douglas’s mom, Ilessa May France Douglas, had taken him to the occasion.

“When Jesse was leaving the auditorium,” Douglas recalled, “I was standing near the door. I told him that I ran track in junior high school, did 21 feet 8 inches in the long jump, ran 100 yards in 10.4 and high-jumped 6 feet. He told me that was better than he did at my age, and ‘keep up the good work.’”

Douglas did. At the following Summer Games, in London in 1948 — the 1940 and 1944 Olympics have been canceled due to World War II — he received the bronze medal within the broad soar, now referred to as the lengthy soar, 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 by way of Chicago, the place Owens lived, and would phone Owens.

“We talked every week for 20 years until he died in 1980,” Douglas stated. “I felt I should do something to memorialize his career. I always tried to imitate him. He was a giving man.”

In 1980, Douglas based the International Amateur Athletic Association, which till 2001 staged an annual black-tie dinner to learn the Jesse Owens Foundation and the United States Olympic Committee. Douglas was the affiliation’s first president and later president emeritus.

Each yr, the affiliation offered its showpiece, the Jesse Owens International 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 Global Award for Peace, offered each two years to a world chief with a sports activities background. Among the winners have been Nelson Mandela; Kofi Annan, the previous secretary common of the United Nations; Juan Antonio Samaranch, the previous head of the International 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. At the ceremony in 1995, Douglas recalled, “Jesse used to say, ‘We all came here on different boats, but if we all don’t row together, America will sink.’ I’m going to do all I can to keep 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 High School in Pittsburgh and attended Xavier University of Louisiana earlier than transferring to the University of Pittsburgh on a scholarship as a soccer halfback. He and Jimmy Joe Robinson have been the crew’s first African American gamers.

“I don’t mean to be immodest,” Douglas as soon as stated, “but no one could cover me when I went out for a pass. The only problem was we didn’t have a quarterback to get me the ball.”

Douglas, who graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in bodily schooling in 1948, described faculty as an onerous place for Black athletes on the time.

“We were harassed on campus,” he stated. “We were definitely called derogatory names by players on opposing teams. I played one year for Clark Shaughnessy. The next year, Wes Fesler was the coach. He told me to forget football. He said I had a future in track, so I stuck with track.”

He earned a grasp’s diploma in schooling from the college in 1950.

He is survived by his spouse, Minerva (Brice) Douglas; his daughter, Barbara Ralston; 4 grandchildren; and several other great-grandchildren. His son, Herbert P. Douglas III, died final yr.

In the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, Douglas labored in advertising and marketing as a salesman and govt for the Pabst Brewing Company. He then joined Schieffelin & Company, later Schieffelin & Somerset Company, which imported wine, Champagne and brandy. When he retired in 1987, he was vp 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 Period of the African American in Sports,” 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. Almost every day, she took it from its place on her living-room wall and wore it, hoping folks 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 Times, died in 2018. Alex Traub contributed reporting.