The Football Player Who Wasn't Supposed to Be a Star
For millions of us, Lee Majors was the man who could run 60 miles an hour and lift a car. But the real story begins much earlier, with a little boy who lost both parents before he was two.
A boy named Harvey Lee Yeary
He was born Harvey Lee Yeary on April 23, 1939, in Wyandotte, Michigan, outside Detroit. His father died before he was born, and his mother was killed in an accident when he was not yet a year and a half old. At two years old, he was adopted by his uncle and aunt, Harvey and Mildred Yeary, who took him to Middlesboro, Kentucky.
A coach in the making
Sports became his whole world. He played track and football at Middlesboro High School and graduated in 1957. He earned a football scholarship to Indiana University, then transferred to Eastern Kentucky University in 1959.
In 1960, he played his first college football game. Afterward, a severe back injury left him paralyzed for two weeks, and it ended his college football career. He recovered, finished his degree in history and physical education in 1962, and planned to become a football coach.
A new name and a new idea
He chose the name Lee Majors in tribute to his childhood hero, Johnny Majors, a Tennessee football player who later became a coach there.
After college he moved to Los Angeles and took a job with the city's Recreation and Parks Department. Then someone suggested he try acting. That someone was Dick Clayton, who had been James Dean's agent, and he recommended acting school. Majors' first role, in the 1964 film Strait-Jacket, was too small to be credited.
Heath Barkley
His big break came on television. For the role of Heath Barkley on ABC's The Big Valley, he was chosen from more than 400 young actors, and one of the others who tried for it was Burt Reynolds. The series ran from 1965 to 1969, for 112 episodes. Barbara Stanwyck starred as the Barkley matriarch, and Linda Evans played Heath's sister, Audra.
The bionic man
In 1973, he played Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut rebuilt with bionic implants, in a TV movie on ABC. It became a weekly series, The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran from 1973 to 1978 for 99 episodes. It was shown in more than 70 countries. In 1977, a contract dispute with Universal Television led to a lawsuit, and the show ended in 1978 as its ratings declined.
During those years, in 1973, he married Farrah Fawcett. They separated in 1979 and divorced in 1982.
One more hit
He wasn't finished. From 1981 to 1986, he played Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy, a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter. The series ran for 113 episodes, and Majors also served as a producer.
In 1984, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in the television category.
What I take from it
It would be easy to say the injury ruined a dream. I think the story runs the other way. If that first college game had gone differently, he might have been a high school coach in Kentucky, and a generation of kids would never have pretended to run in slow motion in the backyard.
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