The legend of Jimmy ‘Peach Head’ Douglas: Miami’s Olympic champion who never was

The greatest sprinter in Miami history never won a Florida High School Athletic Association championship. He never got his shot in the Olympics and hardly even had college coaches clamoring for him until just before he graduated high school in 1960. He was, in pre-integration Florida, a virtual unknown to most of the state until he became an overnight sensation.

The legend of Jimmy “Peach Head” Douglas began at the tail end of the 1950s and came to an end just a few years later. His rise to stardom was not well documented in an era of racial segregation. There are scant records of what he did in the all-Black Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association. What is left are stories. Some are true. Some are apocryphal.

He was a 17-year-old high school phenom who rewrote the FIAA record book and beat Bob Hayes in a 1960 meet. He did beat Bobby Sher, the Miami Hurricanes’ superstar senior, while he was still attending all-Black George Washington Carver High School, making history in the integration of Miami athletics in the process. The city did rally around him and raise money for him to travel across the country for a pair of meets, which had him on the doorstep of the 1960 United States Olympic Trials. And, yes, they did call him “Peach Head” because, quite simply, his head was shaped like a peach.

Sixty years later, stories blur. It’s only natural, especially when so much of his story is lost. No, Douglas didn’t beat Sher and Hayes in the same race in Coral Gables. He didn’t exactly show up in street clothes minutes before his first race at the inaugural Golden West Invitational, although the story of how he got there was still astonishing.

There is one story everyone insists is true, even though there’s no way to prove it. Douglas was going to win a gold medal at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. It says so on his headstone and it has ever since he was laid to rest at Pine Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Miami on Aug. 31, 1961.

“JIMMY DOUGLAS,” it reads, “1964 OLYMPIC CHAMP.”

“My aunt made sure,” said Georgia Marshall Smith, Douglas’ cousin. “He was supposed to go to the ‘64 Olympics and in one of those races he did beat Bob Hayes.”

Douglas was only 18 when he died in an accidental shooting at a friend’s house in Coconut Grove. The neighborhood, which had spent weeks celebrating and raising money for Douglas’ cross-country trip only a year earlier, fell into mourning and collective prayer.

He was a hero for the neighborhood and, in a time before integration, the entire Black community in Miami-Dade County.

“If you talked to anyone that attended Booker T., Mays, Northwestern — everyone knew who ‘Peach Head’ was,” Smith said. “Even to this day when I talk to my peers, they remember ‘Peach Head.’”

Jimmy and the Grove

May 21, 1961. The day everything changed for West Grove.

Coconut Grove already had a reputation for athletics by the time Douglas burst onto the national scene. George Washington Carver, now a middle school, was the all-Black football powerhouse in the 1950s and 1960s, winning eight FIAA championships with legendary coach Nathaniel “Traz” Powell at the helm.

Coconut Grove is the oldest neighborhood in Miami, settled in the early 19th century and inhabited from the outset by white settlers and Black immigrants from the Bahamas, who mostly came to work as chambermaids and carpenters at the Peacock Inn. As wealth poured into Miami around the turn of the 20th century, mansions sprung up along Biscayne Bay to the east and the Black community was pushed exclusively into West Grove. It’s a small triangle with McDonald Street as the eastern border, Charles Avenue to the south and U.S. 1 forming the third side to the northwest. Essentially, it’s 11 blocks north to south and 11 east to west.

Carver, which drew students from this small subsection of Miami and some from the Richmond Heights neighborhood to the south, had an enrollment of a couple hundred students. If it wasn’t for the Hornets’ sports teams, the school would have been easy to overlook and, because it was an all-Black school, most people still did, anyway.

Bob Downes was not one of them. In the 1950s and 1960s, the University of Miami hosted an annual track meet pitting their freshmen against the best seniors from Miami-Dade. In 1959, they hosted the inaugural dual meet and every single athlete was white. A year later, Downes learned about Douglas, and the Carver track and field team, and the Hurricanes coach invited four Hornets to come compete in a pair of special events.

Those four from Carver — Douglas, Edward Keel, Charles Todd and Freddie Johnson — were the first four Black athletes to ever compete on Miami’s campus, and the exhibition is believed to be the first integrated track and field event in Florida history, according to the university’s library.

The Hurricanes had a national championship hopeful with Sher. Douglas was an Olympic hopeful, even if no one was quite sure of it yet. Downes convinced them to race and about 1,200 people surrounded Miami’s track to watch. Douglas jumped out of the gate early three times at the start of the first race race, then trounced Sher in both the 100 and 200 meters, running the races in 10.5 and 20.6 seconds, respectively.

“He easily could qualify for the Olympic trials,” Downes told The Miami News, the now-defunct evening newspaper.

Not even four miles away, another couple thousand were glued to their radios in West Grove. WMBM announced the winner of the race, Coconut Grove Sports Hall of Fame historian Charlie Coney said, and people celebrated at any of the four bars on the corner on Grand Avenue. A few days later, these bars were helping raise money for Douglas to get to California.

“Coconut Grove erupted,” Coney said. “They decided to do the city a gesture, do Coconut Grove a favor, by inviting this fast kid that was a high schooler to run against these college guys, and it put Coconut Grove on the map.

“The city just came unglued.”

He had beaten Hayes in a race earlier in the year, but this was the moment for him to become more than just a sports-page curiosity, the first Black athlete to ever make The News’ All-City team.

Hornets coach Alonzo Fannin led phone drives and organized benefit concerts with local musicians to get Douglas to California for a pair of national competitions. Downes started to work the phones to find Douglas a major college home, telling the coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, according to the Miami Herald, “I think we might have another Jesse Owens for you.”

The funds came together. He flew to California, only there was a mix-up for his first meet: He was supposed to land in Monterey Park, but the plane went to Monterey instead. He didn’t get to Los Angeles until about 3 a.m. on the morning of the Golden West and still won the 220-yard dash at the high school all-star meet. Six days later, Douglas won his heat in the 200 meters to make the semifinals at the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Bakersfield. In qualifying, he bested Bobby Morrow, who won gold in the 200 at the 1956 Summer Olympics.

Why, God?

Aug. 26, 1961. The day “the flame was extinguished on his quest to the Olympics.”

“He was supposed to go fishing with us,” Smith said, “but he didn’t want to get out of bed.”

It was something the Douglases and the Marshalls did often. In the 1940s, Henry and Polly Ann Douglas left Blackshear, Georgia, for Miami, searching for “a better life,” Smith said. He was a veteran and bought a house in Richmond Heights. He and his wife had one child, and, a few years later, his wife’s sister followed them from Georgia to South Florida, settling with her family in Coconut Grove.

Douglas could have attended Mays High School or Carver, and decided on the latter because he could always go stay with his aunt and cousins if he needed to. They were close — he was only about four years older than Smith — and, by proxy, it made Smith a miniature celebrity in the neighborhood.

“I don’t think half Coconut Grove knew my name,” Smith said, “but they said, That’s ‘Peach Head’s’ cousin! That’s ‘Peach Head’s’ cousin!”

The extended family had a plan to go fishing Aug. 24, 1961 — Douglas’ mother was “an avid fisher,” Smith said — and Douglas was undecided. He was back home after a rocky freshman year with the Southern Illinois Salukis. He had trouble academically, Downes told The News, and withdrew from the school in March of 1961, planning to transfer and run for the Grambling State Tigers. He decided to spend one of the last days of summer with some friends.

Hundreds came by the hospital to pray for the 18-year-old phenom. Local radio stations, which were airing his historic race just 15 months earlier, were now cutting into regular programming to ask listeners to give blood.

He died two days later.

“I got down on my knees for three nights and I prayed that my cousin would live,” Smith said, “and when he passed, it sort of shattered my faith because I couldn’t understand why God would take him from us, especially all he offered the community.

“I’m still devastated and it’s 60 years since we lost him.”

‘The World’s Fastest Human’

Oct. 15, 1964: The day he would’ve won.

Hayes was “The World’s Fastest Human.” He got the nickname after winning a pair of gold medals at the 1964 Olympics. He tied the world record in the 100, then anchored the United States to a world record-setting performance in the 400-meter relay.

Four years, earlier Douglas beat him in the 100 at the FIAA championships in Tallahassee. He broke the state-championship record by running the 100-yard dash in 9.7 seconds, but was officially clocked at 9.6 earlier in the year and Downes unofficially timed him as fast as 9.4.

“When they told everybody he was running a 9.4, they didn’t believe it,” said James Colzie, who grew up watching Douglas in Coconut Grove, and later went on to become the president of the FHSAA board of directors. “Everybody was saying, He couldn’t have run a 9.4 That’s humanly impossible. ... They were saying he was running 90 yards instead of 100 yards.”

Miami, for all its tradition of producing high school sprinting stars and reputation for breeding “South Florida speed,” has never had an Olympic gold medalist in the 100 or 200 metres. As the legend goes, Douglas would have been the first.

Given what Coconut Grove produced around the time, it’s easy to believe.

The Hornets’ football dynasty bled into the 1960s and the 1967 Coral Gables Senior High School team, which absorbed most the Carver student body after the all-Black school downsized in 1966, were named the FHSAA’s “Team of the Century.” Gerald Tinker, one of the running backs for the 1967 Coral Gables Senior team, went on to win gold in the 400 relay in the 1972 Summer Olympics, running alongside his cousin, Larry Black, who graduated from Miami Killian Senior High School.

The same year Douglas graduated high school, Bobby Felts graduated from Miami Northwestern Senior High School and, in 1965, he became the first Black player from Miami to play in the NFL. At a pivotal moment in the integration of athletics in South Florida, Douglas was the face of a generation.

“I would say kids 10, 15 years younger,” Smith said, “looked up to ‘Peach Head.’”

After her son died, Polly Ann Douglas “fell faint,” she told The News in 1984, and had to spend 18 days at Jackson Memorial herself.

On the 18th and final day, Rev. Theodore Gibson, who was the president of the Miami chapter of the NAACP, came to visit her.

“Polly, you’re staying here asking God why he took him,” he told her. “You know how it is when you go to the florist or the meat market: You want only the best. God wants the best, too.

“The boy did what God put him here for. He opened doors for a lot of Black folks.”