By Richard Sandomir
Dallas Long, a brawny shot-putter who established himself as one of the best of his era by equaling or setting the world record in that track and field event seven times and winning a gold medal at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, died on Nov. 10 in Columbia Falls, Mont. He was 84.
Suzanne Long, his caregiver and former wife, said he died in hospice care from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He lived in Whitefish, Mont.
During a long period of American domination in the shot-put, the 6-foot-4 Long’s success made him a bridge between Parry O’Brien, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1950s who revolutionized shot-putting technique, and Randy Matson, who in 1965 was the first to break the 70-foot shot-put barrier.
A headline on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1960 called Long the “Leader of the Shot-Put Revolution.” The other insurgents the article mentioned as challenging O’Brien were Bill Nieder and Dave Davis.
“Long is an enormous man; he is only 19 but he weighs over 260 pounds, and he looks bigger than his competition,” the magazine’s Tex Maule wrote after watching him during practice. “He was working placidly on his form, the shot sailing out near the 60-foot mark time and again.”
Long began attracting notice as a teenager. In 1958 he set a high school record of 69 feet 3⅛ inches, using a 12-pound shot. A year later, as a freshman at the University of Southern California — wielding the 16-pound steel ball used in colleges, amateur meets and the Olympics — he matched O’Brien’s world record of 63-2.
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