Malcolm Webster Ford

Malcolm Webster Ford (1862-1902), athlete and journalist. He was born in Brooklyn, the son of Gordon Lester Ford and Emily Webster Ford (a granddaughter of Noah Webster, poet, and lifelong friend of Emily Dickinson).

In his heyday during the 1880s, he was three times the American National Champion as "All Around Athlete", a competition which was the equivalent of today's decathlon. (It consisted of ten events, three of which are different from those which are run today). He also excelled in individual events. In 1885 and 1886 he was the winner at the National Championships of the long jump and 100 and 200 yard dash, a "triple" which was not accomplished again until Carl Lewis did it in 1983.

Ford's father and the Ford family strongly opposed his participation in athletics and he was disinherited because of his refusal to give up competition. He also twice endured scandals for competing as a professional and was banned from amateur competition.

He married Jeanette Graves, an heiress, in 1893 and they had a child, also named Malcolm Webster Ford. The couple divorced in 1898 and Ford was granted custody of the child.

During the period of his marriage Malcolm was a business executive. At other times he worked as a journalist (his articles on track and field events were published in Outing magazine). He launched his own publications twice, but both were failures.

On May 8, 1902, he went to the residence of his brother, the novelist and biographer Paul Leicester Ford and fatally shot him, then took his own life. Ford was said to be in a dire financial condition and his brother had refused him further financial aid. An inquest ruled "temporary insanity".

Notes and references

No full length biography of Malcolm Ford exists. Major references are the biography of Paul Leicester Ford by Paul Z. Dubois, Paul Leicester Ford: an American man of letters 1865-1902, New York: B. Franklin, 1977, and Malcolm Ford's articles for Outing