Barney Berlinger was a multi-sport athlete in
high school, attending
William Penn Charter School and later
Mercersburg Academy, where he was coached by the Scots American trainer
Jimmy Curran. At the
University of Pennsylvania, however, coached by
Lawson Robertson, he started focusing on track and field and especially
decathlon. As the top four were selected, that was enough to make the
Olympic team. He broke the meeting record on each of those occasions; in 1930 he scored 7460 points, his new personal best. Later that year he became
national champion in the non-Olympic
pentathlon. He was one of nine American star athletes sent on a goodwill tour of
South Africa that summer, and he broke the
all-comers records there in several events. Despite only finishing fifth at the national championships, Berlinger still topped the vote for that year's
James E. Sullivan Award; Berlinger missed most of the 1932 indoor season due to an injured back. That summer he concentrated on starting his business career, deciding not to try out for a place at the
Olympic Games in
Los Angeles; At the start of the year in March 1933, Berlinger staged his comeback after the disappointments of 1932, by beating the defending Olympic decathlon champion
Jim Bausch in a head-to—head 'septathlon' contest indoors at
Madison Square Gardens in New York City. He won his only national decathlon title in 1933 with a score of 7597 despite jogging through the final event,
1500 meters, so slowly (7:03.1) that he received no points at all. Due to his versatility and key roles in his teams, Berlinger was at times called a "one-man track team". In high school, he did indeed win Mercersburg a team title by himself. and after
World War II he worked as an instructor for
Army coaches in Europe. In 1952, he was honored by President
Dwight D. Eisenhower by being nominated as a special emissary in the president's People-to-People Sports Program. ==Later life==