Campbell was born in Auburn, California in 1933. During Campbell's childhood, his father had problems with alcoholism, often leaving the family for weeks and months at a time. His mother had health problems, with tuberculosis, a highly contagious disease that limited the contact she could have with her children and continued to force her into the hospital for long periods of time. These problems led to Ben and his older sister Alberta spending much of their early lives in nearby Catholic orphanages.
While working in a fruit-packing plant, Campbell picked a fight with a Japanese co-worker, who put him on his back with a judo move. "I kept finding myself on the bottom, and I didn't like that," he said. "They invited me to come down to their judo club. In those days, Japanese kids were discriminated against very badly; it was right after World War II. I guess I felt a little bit of the same thing and identified with them."
"In those days, judo wasn't in the Olympics, there were no world championships, no intercollegiate and no high school championships - there was nothing. You were just in it because you enjoyed it."
Worn down from his home life, Campbell quit school and joined the Air Force, eventually landing in South Korea, where his passion for judo intensified.
"I think judo taught me dedication to purpose, to not give up and to fight and to not take a beating and all that stuff. But I knew a lot of terrific athletes who weren't training any harder than me, in golf and tennis and other sports, and they ended up making a full-time living and making a lot of money doing that sport."
"In those days, there was almost a spiritual component," he said. "They believed being good - not winning - was what you should strive for. The training was very hard, very brutal.
"As underclassmen, you had to dutifully do everything upperclassmen told you to do. You scrubbed the floors, cleaned the toilets, washed the upperclassmen's uniforms. You did a lot of things American athletes would never submit themselves to do."
"If you lost, you were required to shave your head. If you threw a guy down in training, someone would kick him in the head or stomach to make him try harder. If he got up and threw you down, they'd do the same to you - with no personal animosity. They'd carry a bamboo stick around, and if you weren't trying hard enough, you'd feel it across your back."
"When I was an upperclassman, I was expected to do that to lowerclassmen. But it made me very uncomfortable because I was an American. I didn't do it very hard; one time my instructor told me I was avoiding my responsibilities."
Campbell won six Pacific Coast titles, a gold medal at the 1963 Pan Am Games, an important Olympics tuneup, and three national championships."I'd come back to compete in our national championship,and then go back to train in Japan," he said.
Tokyo was supposed to be the first Asian Olympics host city in 1940, but Japan's invasion of China and World War II ended that. Twenty-four years later, the country hoped to use the event to demonstrate the success of postwar reconstruction. As host, Japan was allowed to choose an additional sport. Not surprisingly, it was judo. "The Japanese had such a strong hold on judo in those years, most people expected everyone else to lose," Campbell said.
Competition was held in four weight divisions, but the open division - Campbell's class - mattered most to the Japanese. The overwhelming favorite was Anton Geesink of the Netherlands, the eventual winner. Still, Campbell dreamed of a dramatic victory, even after injuring his knee at the Olympic trials, the same knee that eventually would betray him before the medal round.
He easily won his first match, but the odds caught up with him in the second, which he calls one of the worst moments of his life."We trained five hours a day, and to have it go out because of an injury . . . it just slipped away," he said.
During the Closing Ceremony, Campbell was chatting with American swimmer Don Schollander, who had won four gold medals, more than any other athlete in Tokyo, when a U.S. official approached the pair. "Don carried the flag into the Closing Ceremonies. I was standing by him, inside the stadium," Campbell said. "One of the officials said, 'Don, you're not going to be going with the rest of the team. You're flying home separately, and you need to leave now. And so they asked me to carry it on the spur of the moment. I wasn't the official carrier, but it was an honor." Despite a limp, Campbell made it to the finish line this time.
Campbell remained involved in judo as an instructor on the national and local levels, and wrote the judo training manual Championship Judo Training Drills, published in 1974.
Campbell became successful in business, ran for the House of Representatives, was elected, ran for the Senate, was elected and served many years. He was a U.S. Senator from Colorado from 1993 until 2005 and was for some time the only Native American serving in the U.S. Congress. Campbell was a three term U.S. representative from 1987 to 1993, when he was sworn into office as a Senator following his election on November 3, 1992. He was only the 3rd Native American to serve in the U.S. Congress in history. He was the second Native American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was also the second Native American to serve in the U.S. Senate. Campbell also serves as one of forty-four members of the Council of Chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe.One day, when an attacker came at Senator Quentin Burdick, Senator Nighthorse Campbell used his judo skills to take down the man and protect his fellow senator. In 2008 Ben Nighthorse Campbell was inducted into the USA Judo Hall of Fame.
