Olympic gold medalist who was ‘famous for not being famous’ lived in Mississauga for 8 years

He was the first Black American to win Olympic gold in decathlon, but former Mississauga resident Milton Campbell never became a household name.

More commonly known as Milt, Campbell was born in New Jersey in 1933 and died of prostate cancer at the age of 78 in Gainesville, Georgia on Nov. 2, 2012.

In his first Olympic Games, Helsinki, Campbell won the silver medal but he was not satisfied, according to the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum. 

“People were happy and congratulating me that I had gotten a silver medal,” Campbell reportedly said. “But I was disappointed. I wanted to win. I figured that if I could have trained more and gotten used to all the events, I would have won the gold medal.”

Four years later, Campbell returned to win gold at the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games. He set an Olympic record with 7,937 points and became the first African American to win the event.

But Campbell’s athletic career didn’t end there. He was an all-around athlete who swam, practiced judo and played running back on the football team at Indiana University.

After achieving Olympic gold, Campbell, who stood six feet three inches and weighed about 220 pounds, was drafted into the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns in 1957. It was an experience with the Cleveland Brown’s coach that led him to move to Canada.

Campbell was pulled into coach Paul Brown’s office just before the Cleveland Browns’ opening game in 1958. The coach wanted to know why Campbell had just married a white woman, Campbell told news outlets. Campbell told the coach it was none of his business.

“The next day I got a notice to come to the office, where they handed me a letter saying my services were no longer needed,” Campbell told Sports Illustrated in 1996. “I waited half a day in Paul Brown’s office, but he didn’t have the courage to come talk to me. And I was blackballed out of the league.”

Campbell moved on to the Canadian Football League, where he played for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 1958, Montreal Alouettes in 1959, and the Toronto Argonauts in 1961 and 1964. He also played for the Ontario Rugby Football Union’s Kitchener Waterloo-Dutchmen in 1960.

The family, including Campbell, his wife Barbara and three children, left their Mississauga (Cooksville) home in 1967. The couple had lived in Cooksville for eight years, according to the Ontario Digital Archive record. Campbell reportedly wanted to join the civil rights movement after seeing the riots in New Jersey that summer.

Over the years Campbell, lamented the fact that despite his achievements, he wasn’t well known.

“I’ve probably been the greatest athlete this country has ever seen,” he said in a 1980 interview with The New York Times.

His last wife Linda Rusch said he was the “guy who’s famous for not being famous.”

In later years, he received more recognition. He was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1999. In 2000, the New Jersey Sportswriters Association named Campbell its New Jersey Athlete of the Century, and he was later inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

 

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Photos: Public Record Office Victoria