Sport: Track & Field
Born: December 31, 1957
Town: Paterson, New Jersey
Franklin Jacobs was born December 31, 1957 in Mullins, South Carolina and moved north with his mother to Paterson, NJ, in 1961, after his parents separated. Franklin lived with his cousins, who were big basketball players, and that became his sport as a boy. Always small for his age, Franklin topped out at 5’8”. However, his leaping ability made him a dunking, shot-blocking force on the North Jersey playgrounds and on the hardwood as a varsity guard for East Side High in the mid-1970s. When he jammed, he sometimes banged his head on the rim. That’s not a typo.
During Franklin’s senior year, East Side track coach Bill Shipp talked him into trying the high jump. He set the bar at 6’1”—an inch higher than anyone else on the team could clear—and Franklin glided effortlessly over the top. He turned and told his teammates that he thought he could clear seven feet.
One year later, as a freshman at Fairleigh-Dickinson, Franklin cleared 7’1”. He regularly cleared seven feet in practice, often without removing his warm-ups.
That Franklin was competing in college at all was a stroke of good fortune. Because he started so late in track & field, no college offered him an athletic scholarship. He attended FDU with help from a federal grant and began competing for Russ Rodgers’s varsity. During his college years, Franklin developed a close friendship with the school’s sports information director, Jay Horowitz, who went on to run PR for the New York Mets.
In 1977, Franklin won the NCAA Indoor and Outdoor titles. By 1978, as a 20-year-old, he was threatening the world record of 7’7”—despite torn cartilage in his right knee. Franklin began a heated rivalry with Dwight Stones, the top American high jumper, as both men set their sights on gold at the 1980 Olympics. Though some labeled Franklin as a “natural” jumper, he worked tirelessly on every aspect of his technique. He used a unique jumping style he called “The Slope.” During one three-month period he concentrated entirely on his approach, never setting the bar higher than six feet.
In 1978, Franklin beat Stones at the Millrose Games in New York and set a new world record of 7’ 7 ¼” in the process. No one had ever jumped that high over his own “head” (23 ¼”).
In 1979, Franklin won gold medals at the Pan American Games and the World Cup. In 1980, he won the US National indoor and outdoor titles. The Summer Olympics in Moscow promised an epic head-to-head showdown with Russian high-jumper Vladimi Yaschchenko, who had broken Franklin’s Millrose record. When President Carter imposed a boycott on the 1980 Olympics, Franklin was so upset that he essentially quit the sport. He returned to Paterson, where he worked in construction.
In 1984, Franklin was tempted to make another run at Olympic glory. He entered the Mobil Indoor Games at the Meadowlands and stunned the crowd by clearing 7’4 1/2″ without any training. His comeback ended there, however. Years of inactivity and a nagging knee issue convinced Franklin not to go any father. He moved to Phoenix in the 1990s.
In 1998, Franklin was honored for his Millrose record during Madison Square Garden’s 30th anniversary celebration.