John Doherty (athlete)

John Kenneth "Kack" Doherty (May 16 1905 – April 19 1996) was an American athlete who competed mainly in the Decathlon.

Born of Canadian parents who crossed the Detroit River to find work in Detroit, Doherty was a native of Detroit and a 1923 graduate of Western High School; he described his athletic career as one of "persistence remembers". At City College of Detroit (preceded Wayne State University), Doherty was no more than a dual-meet point-winner, but with remarkable consistency among several track and field events; a logical candidate for the decathlon.

City College's athletic director, the legendary David L. Holmes, who initially coached all sports at the new municipal university, had himself been a candidate for the Decathlon in the 1908 Olympic tryouts. Among other coaches of his time, Holmes was noted for taking mediocre high-school trackmen and turning them into collegiate and national champions. Much of Doherty's later coaching, including not only his authorship of a leading book on track technicques that continued Holmes's earlier Holmes's Movies on Paper but also his resolute support of amateur intercollegiate athletics, paralleled the approach of his mentor

Doherty trained indoor on a track built in the 1880s for City College's "Old Main," when that large building served as Detroit's Central High School. He trained for outdoor track on a field maintained by the City of Detroit on an island in the Detroit River, Belle Isle, two miles from City College. As Doherty indicates in his autobiography, the outdoors team had neither dressing room nor showers. Even in his time, these facilities were outdated.

Yet Doherty won four City College varsity letters. Despite the facilities in which he trained, he also won the National AAU Decathlon in 1928 and 1929 and the bronze medal in the decathlon at the Amsterdam Olympics, becoming the first of Holmes's three Olympians. Developing in college into a remarkable athlete, he set an American record for the event in 1929 at Denver with 7784 points, conquering the 5000-foot altitude as well. All 10 events were held in one day, the custom of five events on each of two days not starting until the 1930s.

Doherty earned his B. A. degree in 1927 and went on to gain his Ph.D. in Physical Education at the University of Michigan in 1948. He coached at Detroit Southwestern High School (1929), before his combination of ability, genuineness,and Olympic pedigree caused him to coach at Princeton University (1930), the University of Michigan (1930-1948) and Pennsylvania (1948-1961), before retiring in 1968. While at Penn, he was the director of the Penn Relays and the first USA-USSR dual track meet and was the president of the National Track Coaches Association and previously elected to the Helms Track and Field Hall of Fame and the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.

John Kenneth Doherty is the author of Track and Field Omnibook - one of the world's most highly regarded and best-selling sports related publications. In 1977, Doherty was enshrined in the Wayne State University Athletic Hall of Fame. He remains one of the best known figures connected with the historic Penn Relays.

Sources

* [http://wsuathletics.cstv.com/genrel/070604aag.html Wayne State University Athletics]