Born in
Dumas, Arkansas, Hines was raised in
Oakland, California, and graduated from
McClymonds High School in 1964. He was a
baseball player in his younger years Hines attended
Texas Southern University in
Houston, Texas. He was a member of the Texas Southern University Tigers track team. A few months later, at the
1968 Summer Olympics, Hines – a
black athlete – found himself in a tense situation, with
racial riots going on in his home country and a threat of a boycott by the black athletes of the U.S. team, who were disturbed by the controversial idea of admitting
apartheid South Africa to the Games and revelations linking the head of the
International Olympic Committee,
Avery Brundage, to a racist and
antisemitic country club. Hines reached the 100 m final, and won it with the time 9.89 appearing on the screen, later corrected to 9.95. The 9.89 was taken from a light beam across the finish line, while the official photographic process used
Polaroid film and took a couple of minutes to process and read. There was some controversy over how his (slower appearing) automatic time of 9.95 should compare to the hand timed 9.9 world record (Hines was again recorded at 9.9 in his 9.95 race). Automatic times start instantly with the sound of the gun, while hand times include human reaction time to start the watch. It took until 1977 before
fully automatic timing was required of world records. As the fastest electronic time to that point, Hines' mark was recognized exclusively as a new world record. The race was also significant for being the third all-black podium in Olympic history. Hines helped break another world record, when he and his teammates sprinted to the
4 × 100 m relay gold at the same Games. ==Professional football career==