A FAMILY TIME CAPSULE REVISITED; CHRISTIAN McCAFFREY REACHES MELBOURNE

BY ELLIOTT DENMAN
 
It’s a venue that has hosted at least seven disparate sports.
 
Alexa  tells me it’s 10,374  air miles/ 16.695 kilometers away from my New Jersey home.
 
Across 14 time zones.
 
And the centerpiece of a reverberating story line that I calculate to date 70 years, three months, and a handful of days back in its life cycle.
 
It’s the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, “the MCC,” now the home of a history, memory-laden, 100,000-seat stadium,  first established (as a far smaller structure, back in the 1850s) primarily for cricket (of course), then rugby and Aussie-rules football, and as the years have flown, athletics (track and field), soccer, occasional baseball games, and now American football, too.
 
 Crunch all those numbers and what do we have?
 
Let me take this moment to tell you they add up to one of the most intriguing sports stories very few – even one of the vital participants – may ever be able to tell you.
 
Take my hand as I escort you way-way-way back - into the
 
dusty archives I just happen to have inventoried away in my well-stocked memory bank.
 
Hear me out, please, as we board this time machine.
 
To the spring months of 1956 as David Sime, a  Duke University sophomore out of Fair Lawn, Bergen County, New Jersey – a short dash from the George Washington Bridge - displays such incredible speed playing the outfield and circling the bases for the Blue Devils that he’s recruited away from baseball, the sport that first got him from Fair Lawn High School to the Durham, North Carolina campus.
 
  In no-time-flat, the lightning-fast Sime is enticed  to the Duke track and field team and proves so sensational as a Duke dashman – running sensational 9.4 clockings or better for 100 yards  eight separate times, 20 flat 220-yard marks and a 21.2 220 low hurdles time - that Uncle Sam’s talent scouts begin envision  suiting him up in the Olympic duds he’d surely be sporting at the Games of the XVI Olympiad coming up half a year later - Down Under, at The MCC.
 
   A long-long array of connective elements now kick in.  Let’s explain:.
 
   Initially, Buenos Aires appeared the top choice of the International Olympic Committee to serve as host city to the first Olympic Games ever allocated to the Southern Hemisphere.  But that never happened – the Argentine capital lost the IOC ballot by a single vote - and the baton of opportunity was now passed forward to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
 
    And the Aussies grabbed it with a passion perhaps never before seen at an Olympic Games.  Starting in the last week of November and proceeding into the first week of December 1956, that sports-frenzied city in a sports-frenzied nation went on to stage what is – to this day – considered a truly great Games,
 
  Still, with brutal headline-dominating world events – the Hungarian uprising to counter  Soviet occupation, and the Suez-blocking crisis that threatened to cease all operations through that vital channel – taking place in that very same time frame,  the future of those Melbourne Games faced some serious jeopardy.
 
   But, Good On ‘Em, those astounding Aussies emerged from their big cities and paddled out of their billabongs to pull it all off in truly championship  fashion.  Sure, the national teams of Spain, Switzerland, Netherlands and five more stayed away in moral protest. Sure, there was blood in the pool as fierce antagonists Hungary and the Soviet Union went at it in water polo.
 
  Nevertheless, the Games of ’56 – declared “open” by Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in gala ceremonies -  went on otherwise unscathed and delivered a string of new heroes and heroines to the waiting world.  Among them: the Bill Russell-led USA basketball team; heavyweight lifting king Paul Anderson, “the Dixie Derrick”; French-Algerian marathon man Alain Mimoun, and Aussie swimmer Dawn Fraser, sprinter Betty Cuthbert and hurdler Shirley Strickland de la Hunty.
 
    Amazingly to many, so much of the American delegation was at the top of its heap, even with the Games being half a planet away and latest in the calendar year – way past usual Northern Hemisphere seasons - of any Games ever held.
 
  At the tippity-top of it all  was the USA men’s track and field team.  Of the sport’s 24 events, 15 of them saw American athletes at the pinnacle of the podium.
 
Nine of those Americans broke Olympic records, witnessed by vast daily crowds in the historic and reconstrued-many-times  MCC, along the Yarra River, not very far from downtown Melbourne.
 
  Nine more American trackmen gained silvers, four took bronzes, and there were four 1-2-3 sweeps. So that – amazing but true - left just nine events to be claimed by the fastest-strongest-leapingest male delehgates of all the rest of the planet.
 
  Now, here’s where this story reverberates all the way back to Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and Durham, North Carolina.
 
   None of those proud-as-can-possibly-be USA athletes in Melbourne was  named Dave Sime.
 
   The 6-foot-3, 195-pound bolt of human lightning was back home – surely reading all about his medal-grabbing countrymen, surely desperate to see it all on TV, but thwarted by the awful delays caused by lack of a coaxial cable able to transmit coverage over oceans.
 
    Despite all those amazing, record-smashing feats in the spring of 1956, Dave Sime’s Olympic hopes came crashing to earth with the muscle pull he encountered in the NCAA Championships in early June.  Limited to painful striding, he went home after crashing out of the first round of the 100-meter dash at the USA Olympic Trials held June 29-30 at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
 
   Instead, a rising junior at Abilene Christian College in Texas emerged as the fastest man in America and, five months later, fastest in the world, at the MCC.
 
   He’s Bobby Joe Morrow – with his 10.5 100, 20.6 200-meter  five-ringed triumphs, along with his scorching anchor leg in the 4x100 relay – who becomes an Olympic tripler. Oh, and a bit later, Sports Illustrated magazine’s athlete of the year.
 
  The rest of that ’56 Team USA featured gold-medal luminaries Charley Jenkins (400 meters), Tom Courtney of Livingston, NJ  (800), high hurdler Lee Calhoun, intermediate hurdler Glenn Davis, high jumper Charley Dumas, pole vaulter Rev. Bob Richards, long jumper Greg Bell, shot putter Parry O’Brien, discus thrower Al Oerter,, hammer thrower Harold Connolly, decathlete Milt Campbell of Plainfield, NJ, and those illustrious 4x100 and 4x400 relay teams.
 
  Best of the rest of the track world?   The vote went to Soviet 5,000/10,000-meter doubler Vladimir Kuts and Norwegian world record-setting javelinist Egil Danielsen.
 
  Well, you may now ask, why are all these long-long-ago moments still floating around so freshly in my neocortex?
 
   Simple answer.  Your author was one of the most fortunate few able to witness all these glories, as a 22-year-old recent New York University graduate who’d volunteered for America’s 50-kilometer racewalking team and, astoundingly to him to this very day, was tapped on the shoulder by his Uncle Sam and told, “yes, Elliott, the opportunity is yours,”
 
   My 11th place finish in the 31.1-mile race won by Norman Read of New Zealand left me far-far from the podium – but it was my ticket to an historic event and an incredible influence on all my years since.
 
   Now, rush forward to the end of the next quadrennium. Dave Sime – now fully rehabbled and on his way to a brilliant professional career in opthalmology, sprints his way to the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, where he claims a silver medal in the 100 meters, just tantalizingly centimeters back of Germany’s Armin Hary,  and thought he had a gold medal as he anchored America’s 4x100 relay team, hurtling past German anchor Martin Lauer in world record time, only to see that vision evaporate in the wake of a baton-passing mishap along the way.
 
  Fast forward with even greater velocity again .
 
   Dave Sime’s daughter Lisa would marry New York Giants/49ers/Broncos wide receiver  Ed McCaffrey.   Based in Colorado, they’d raise four very-very robust athletic sons; most famously  Christian Jackson McCaffrey, who arrived June 7,1996.
 
  By now, you may be grasping the rest of this story, as radio-day superstar Paul Harvey kept putting it for years and years.
 
   After nine full seasons, and heading into his 10th,  Stanford grad Christian McCaffrey continues to be one of the NFL’s premier running backs.  A fourth-year San Francisco 49er, after six   seasons with the Carolina Panthers, he’s already netted over 13,000 career yards, 98 touchdowns, four  Pro Bowl designations, and a reputation as one of the NFL’s elite.
 
  But he’s never played a game like the one he’ll play starting 10:35 a.m.
 
Friday (Aussie Eastern standard time),  8:35 pm. Thursday USA EST). in the 2026 N FL-season-opening clash with the Los Angeles Rams.
 
  And just where will this game be played?.
 
   Simply amazing-but-still-true, it will be played in the stadium McCaffrey’s grandfather so-so passionately dreamed of getting to – but never did.
 
     A packed house is expected to be there at the old MCC for this first NFL game ever to be played in Australia.
 
   We don’t really know if Dr. Dave Sime ever had the chance – or the willingness - to take his grandson aside and relate his own Melbourne story – the story that went up in flames when that his leg popped in lJune 1956.
 
   Well, just in case Dr. Sime hadn’t done so before his too-early passing at age 79 in 2016 - we’re taking that opportunity to tell it you, dear readers, right now.
 
   All those earlier-cited numbers – all those time zones, those air miles, those calendar pages, those chapters in the MCC’s own stunning history -  will register once again.  Now that we’ve brought this story up to date, now look for Dr. Dave Sime’s brilliant grandson to rack up a pack of new ones at The Old MCC.
 
   G‘ Day, folks, and see it all on Netflix.