Are there any celebrities that went to your high school? How about sports stars?
My high school, an all-boys Catholic school in Newark, NJ, only existed for 23 years, from 1957 to 1980. During that time the size of Essex Catholic High School gradually shrunk from 2000 boys to 600 boys before moving out of Newark and soon after closing.
Since readers here are track and field fans, I can brag about my school’s sports celebrity: none other than Marty Liquori, who put a 3:59 mile on the display of school records on our high school gym wall.
But this story is not about Marty. Believe it or not a good case can be made that Marty was not the top track and field athlete in our school’s history. In fact, he probably wasn’t even the most accomplished on his high school team in 1967!
That would be Mark Murro.
Who is Mark Murro you ask? Mark rewrote the high school record books 54 years ago in the javelin. Speaking of celebrities, the national high school javelin record that Mark beat by ten feet was previously held by Terry Bradshaw. Yes, THAT Terry Bradshaw. Four-time Super Bowl champion quarterback with the Pittsburgh Steelers Terry Bradshaw.
Imagine the scene at high school track meets in north Jersey in 1967 when Essex Catholic showed up. While Marty was winning every race in sight, Mark was disrupting the meets as his 250+ foot javelin throws were soaring out of the infield and putting the runners on the far turn in danger of getting harpooned.
Like his high school teammate Marty Liquori, Mark Murro’s skills shined even more brightly in college, first at Mesa Community College, then Arizona State. A year after graduating from Essex Catholic High, Mark won the Olympic Trials javelin and followed it up with a 9th place finish at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. A year later he broke the American record and was put on the cover of Track & Field News. A year after that he became the first American to reach the 300 foot milestone, just a few feet short of the then world record, as well as the first to break 90 meters. In an event where performance peaks generally happen in an athlete’s late 20s or 30s, Mark was still just 20 years old.
Alas, a cascade of injuries derailed his athletic career after that. He competed through 1972 and retired from track and field at the age of 23. His American Record throw stood for 12 years.
