From a 1958 Sports Illustrated---
This dashing young man in the Rugby outfit plays standoff on the team at
Pomona College in California, where he is a senior. But this is only a
small facet of 21-year-old Kris Kristofferson's amazing record. He is
also starting left end on the varsity football team, a Golden Gloves
boxer, sports editor of the college paper, outstanding cadet in the ROTC
battalion of which he is cadet commander. As an English major he is an
honor student and member of the four-man senior honor society on campus.
Kris won four of the top 20 awards recently given in a creative writing
contest for college students. He composes folk songs which he sings to
his own guitar accompaniment. And to crown this varied list of
accomplishments Kris is a Rhodes scholar-elect, one of 32 young
Americans chosen to go to Oxford this fall. As the eldest of three
children of Major General and Mrs. Henry Kristofferson, Kris will find
travel familiar. The family has done a lot of it keeping up with their
airline-executive father (the senior Kristoffersons are in Saudi Arabia,
where the general is operations manager for Aramco Airlines), and Kris
has lived in Texas, Washington, New York and California. It was in San
Mateo that he attended high school and distinguished himself as a
distance runner. At Oxford he will study English literature to prepare
for a writing career.