Games behind
Mulkey placed second at the 1959 Pan American Games behind Dave Edstrom. In 1961 he surpassed Vasili Kuznetsov's world record by scoring 8,727 points at the Southeastern AAU (the equivalent of USATF in the day) meet in his home town of Memphis, Tennessee, but the record was never ratified by the IAAF because the field was not approved.