Post World-War II: The Speed City Era Begins

DeWitt Portal, an SJSC grad, began his career at the college during The Depression in 1934.  A physical education instructor, he initially worked as an assistant football coach. Three years later, he started the college’s boxing program.  Yoshihiro Uchida and Bud Winter arrived in San Jose in 1940.  An engineering major, Uchida wrestled and assisted Mel Bruno in training police cadets in the art of judo. Winter taught physical education, and coached the track and field squad.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Uchida’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese on the mainland sent to internment camps.  While his parents were sent to camp in Poston, Arizona, Uchida entered the Army.  Just as the Black American soldiers, Japanese servicemen served in segregated units.  Initially, Uchida served in a KP (kitchen patrol) unit, and worked as a custodian on various military bases throughout the Midwest.  Once a superior officer discovered Uchida had taken coursework in the sciences, he transferred him to a hospital where he would serve as a medic.

Persons listed: DeWitt Portal, Bud Winter, Julius Menendez, Yoshihiro Uchida, Lincoln Kimura, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Ray Norton.
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Portal and Winter left their teaching and coaching duties in San Jose for the Navy.  Portal was stationed in Athens, Georgia, where he coached boxing.  Winter was stationed in Sunnyvale, California, where he prepared pilots for combat by teaching them relaxation techniques.  (Winter also invented a life jacket that would inflate upon contact with water while serving in the military.)  Golden Glover Julius Menendez, who hailed from East St. Louis, Illinois, joined the Navy, and, like Portal, eventually was stationed in Athens.

Upon the War’s end in 1945, Portal, Uchida, and Winter would return to SJSC.  With a bit of encouragement from Portal, Menendez would join the trio on campus in ’46.  Lincoln Kimura, who earned a B.A. from San Jose State and an M.A. from Stanford, would return to the college in 1949, and become its first athletic trainer.

The impact that these men would have on the collegiate sporting scene in America over the next decade would be tremendous.  However, the strides that many of their athletes would make on the athletic landscape throughout the years that followed would be even more widely acknowledged, as those athletes would occupy positions of worldwide prominence.

Throughout Portal’s notable career as a coach, his teams collected a string of team (17 Pacific Coast Intercollegiate championships) and individual titles (five individual National Collegiate Athletic Association titles, two Amateur Athletic Union crowns, and an Olympic gold medal).  As well, Portal (along with Menendez, who became his assistant) pushed the NCAA to require protective headgear, and increase the ropes around the boxing ring from three to four, an important safety improvement.

Mel Bruno followed former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney into business after the War, while Uchida returned to campus.  Under Uchida’s guidance the judo program, however, took on an entirely new direction: it changed from a method of self-defense to a full-fledged intercollegiate sport.  He instituted a weight-classification system and pushed for its acceptance by the International Olympic Committee.  In 1964 Uchida, who holds a degree in biology from San Jose State, coached the U.S. team that featured SJSC graduate and retired Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Northern Cheyenne heritage.  Uchida, who remains the Spartan coach, has led his teams to an incredible 40 out of 44 National Collegiate Judo Championships.

Menendez boxed professionally, and coached and worked as an official at the collegiate level while pursuing a degree in English at San Jose State.  After he completed his master’s in Education at Stanford University, he moved south to Tulare to teach.  His career as a high school teacher was short lived, however.  Following the death of Portal in 1953, SJSC officials persuaded Menendez to return to the campus to take over the Spartan boxing team.

The boxing program remained more than competitive under Menendez’s direction.  Within a few years, he caught the attention of the U.S. Olympic Committee, during which time he led the Spartans to three consecutive team titles.  In 1960 he coached the U.S. Olympic boxing team that featured the brash, young light heavyweight Cassius Clay – now better known as Muhammad Ali – who would go on to make history as a professional heavyweight world champion, and for his refusal to enter the Vietnam draft.  (Menendez also coached the U.S. Olympic soccer team in 1976, and remains the only person to have ever coached two sports at the Olympic level.)

Bud Winter’s illustrious career would span the careers of five presidents, three wars, the advent of television, and the birth of Rock-n-Roll.  His career, too, would span a host of changes that would rock the political and social landscape of America, with some of those changes being brought about by a number of the very athletes he had coached.

Though Winter had coached some fairly successful teams through the 1940s and early 1950s, it was not until the mid ’50s that a young Black sprinter would bring Winter’s genius to the forefront.

Ray Norton, then a high school senior, tells the story of Winter watching him run on the track along with a couple of friends days before the national outdoor track and field championships at the University of California.  Winter questioned the young sprinter, and told him that if he were to come to San Jose State, he would make him “the World’s Fastest Human.”

Within two years of his arrival in San Jose, Norton, who competed in the 1956 Olympic trials as an Oakland City College freshman, literally, became the World’s No. 1-ranked sprinter.  Teaching the same relaxation methods he had taught fighter pilots during the Second World War, Winter trained Norton to relax while sprinting.  Norton later would set or break world records in the 100 and 200 meters, and the 100 and 220 yards six times during the 1958, ’59 and ’60 outdoor seasons. 

With the coming of Norton and California State Junior College champion sprinter Robert Poynter in 1956 and ’58, respectively, San Jose would become known as Speed City.

In all, Winter, an assistant Olympic coach in 1960, would coach 37 world record holders, 102 NCAA All-Americans, 49 NCAA record holders, and 27 Olympians.  And though he may be best remembered for his innovative Operation Gym Suit (which sent American athletes overseas as goodwill ambassadors), international coaching clinics, and several coaching books, including the long-time bestseller So You Want to be Sprinter, there are those who remember him for his somber appearance after watching the so-called “Black Power” protest of his athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, on the winners’ podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Winter’s daughter, Kathi Winter, recalls standing at his side that afternoon as the Star Spangled Banner was played . . . Smith and Carlos, the gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter dash, respectively, bowed their heads and raised gloved fists in protest of the discriminatory practices people of color endured during that time period.  There was some booing from the American spectators, and within hours, the pair was banned from the Olympic Village by the U.S. and International Olympic committees.

 “He was totally shocked, and very horrified, I think,” Kathi said. “He was amazed because he truly didn’t know that they were going to protest in that way.  He said that if they would’ve told him, he would have tried to talk them out of it . . . They knew that.”

Bert Bonanno, who had spent the past several years in Mexico preparing athletes for the Games and who earlier had served as SJSC’s freshman track coach, remembers the commotion among spectators that day:  “People were talking, they were angry, surprised, crying . . . We saw all emotions possible.”

Smith and Carlos had become much more than world-class sprinters.  Overnight, the clinched-fisted image of them together had become a symbol for profound social change. Back to Top