Randy Matson, One of the Greatest Texas Aggies

I met Randy Matson once. The year was 1995, and the setting was the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in Waco. I had come up from Austin to witness the induction of former SMU football star Jerry LeVias. Matson, a member of the Hall since 1974, was there in support of Emory Bellard (who had coached the Texas A&M football team). Head of the Aggies’ alumni association, he had probably matured and come to regret some of the statements he made to the media about my alma mater, calling it “tu” and us “teasips.” In one running of the Texas Relays, he had been aggravated if not outraged to find that the spherical iron ball he was to use in the shot put was orange. Before the competition began, Matson did his utmost to scrape off as much of that detested paint as possible.

Soon after his birth in Kilgore in 1945, the Matson family moved to Borger and then Pampa; prior to becoming an Aggie, he was a Panhandle guy. In his first track meet, in 1957, Matson won two sprints, the long jump and the high jump. But rather astoundingly, he finished sixth in the event for which he would gain international renown.

Pampa High School coach Dwaine Lyon noted Matson’s vast potential and gave him extra attention. Lyon somehow found movies of shot-put stars Dallas Long and Parry O’Brien, and the two studied them closely. Big, strong and talented, Matson threw the shot and the discus for the Harvesters (he won state in both in 1962 and 1963), but he also excelled in football and basketball. Some 200 schools recruited him, and he chose the one in College Station.

Matson stood 6′ 6″ and weighed 215 pounds in the summer of 1963 when he attended Fish Camp, as all entering students did then, and began to imbibe Texas A&M’s traditions and values. Hank Foldberg and Gene Stallings surely wanted Matson to play football, but he resisted their entreaties. (The Ags went 1-9 in his freshman year, 3-7 in his sophomore year, 4-5-1 in his junior year and 7-4 [SWC and Cotton Bowl champs] in his senior year.) A wise decision, since one football injury could have derailed Matson’s track & field career.

In October 1964, he set aside maroon and white, and put on red, white and blue. At the Tokyo Olympics, he threw 66′ 3 1/2″ to win a silver medal behind his hero Dallas Long. This is quite impressive in light of the fact that he had only begun using the 16-pound ball in the summer. Long predicted greatness for the young man, as did others.

On the collegiate scene, he was all but unbeatable. Matson won the Southwest Conference title in the shot put and the discus all three varsity years and the NCAA’s in both 1966 and 1967. He won 73 of 79 competitions from 1965 to 1971 (he was affiliated with the Houston Striders after graduation). During a meet at Kyle Field in 1965, he broke the world record in the shot put by going 70′ 7 1/4″; twice before, he had apparently set a new mark, but both were invalidated by technicalities. Matson would top that again in 1967 with a throw of 71′ 5″. How dominant, how truly great was James Randel Matson? Consider that at one point, he had 52 of the top 53 throws of all time. And in the discus, his 213′ 9″ on April 8, 1967 came within three inches of the world record.

Matson was the AAU shot-put champ in 1964, from 1966 to 1970 and again in 1972, and won the Sullivan Award—top amateur athlete in the United States—in ’67. The latter award was for Matson’s work with the shot put and discus. He appears to have never thrown the hammer or javelin.

Let me pause here to look at Matson the hoopster. I wish Shelby Metcalf (1930–2007) was still around so I could ask him how he talked Matson into joining the 1966 Aggies basketball team. An injury on the hard courts was possible, as Matson must have realized. And playing basketball could have done nothing for his ability to toss the shot put or discus. But there he was at G. Rollie White Coliseum and other venues, playing Dr. Naismith’s game. A&M went 15-9 that season, and Matson was always in the starting lineup. He averaged 8.2 points and 10 rebounds, and shot 49.1% from the field and 43.8% from the stripe. Metcalf had him handle center jump duties, despite the presence of 6′ 9″ John Beasley. (Beasley went on to a seven-year career with the Dallas Chaparrals and Utah Stars, and was MVP of the 1969 ABA All-Star Game.)

I remember watching the Ags on TV and focusing my attention on their husky forward. A shot-putter playing hoops? How could he be any good? I am here to tell you the guy could play. Matson ran the court well, had soft hands and was surprisingly agile. Metcalf did not run many plays for him, it’s true. But he scored on put-backs, collected a lot of ribbies, set picks which no opponent could get through and played defense.

Matson added muscle, of course, eventually getting up to 270 pounds. But that did not keep him from running goal line to goal line at Kyle Field one day in 10.2 seconds. The fact that both the Seattle SuperSonics and the Atlanta Falcons drafted him in 1967 is a clear indication that basketball and football men saw something in him. He never seriously considered those options, however.

He married Margaret Burns, whom he’d known since grade school in Pampa, in July 1966. She was then a cheerleader at Abilene Christian; all three of their children would attend A&M.

By no means was Matson through with the shot put. At the Mexico City Olympiad, he spun, glided and launched it 67′ 4″ to win the gold medal. His world record, which he’d held for eight years, was finally broken on May 5, 1973 when Al Feuerbach narrowly topped it. After coming in fourth in the 1972 U.S. Olympic Trials, Matson announced his retirement. He did so with a pointed joke about one of the guys who had made the team: “When I can’t beat Brian Oldfield, it’s time to quit.” Oldfield, a flamboyant man who did all he could to unnerve opponents, broke Feuerbach’s mark in 1975. A couple of East Germans, Udo Beyer and Ulf Timmerman, traded world records between 1978 and 1988, but they came to be largely discredited because of their use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Two other Aggies, Randy Barnes and Mike Stulce, would later become masters of the shot put. Barnes won silver in Seoul in 1988 and gold in Atlanta in 1996. He was ineligible to compete in Barcelona in 1992 because he had been busted for steroids. Stulce took gold in Barcelona, but only after returning from a two-year doping ban. Caught again in 1993, he was permanently kicked out of the sport.

And Matson—was he clean? The shot put, an event that relies on explosive power, has long had a shady, drug-clouded reputation. In a 2008 ESPN interview, he suggested that steroids are not especially helpful, and that technique, balance and footwork are just as important as brute strength.

He has, in a sense, never left Aggieland. Matson was hired by the Association of Former Students in 1972, becoming its executive director eight years later. A fundraiser between 1999 and 2007, he “helped former students and friends fulfill their charitable giving goals,” as a TAMU web site put it. He still lives in College Station.

I notice that Randy Barnes’ tainted 21-year-old shot-put mark was broken by Ryan Crouser at the recent U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Oregon. He threw a splendid 76′ 6″, five feet farther than Matson’s best. In interviews after the meet, the University of Texas graduate (gold-medal winner at Rio de Janeiro in 2018) made special efforts to emphasize that shot-put competition is now drug free.

Be that as it may, I doubt Crouser, Barnes, Stulce et al. would have done very well as college basketball players.