Above & Beyond Part 6: Tim Mack and Olympic gold

by Bill Livingston

Tuesday August 19, 2008, 12:56 AM

He propped his pole on his shoulder and raised his arms above his head, slamming his palms together, rhythmically clapping. The whole stadium began clapping along with him.

IN THE JUMPING ORDER for the Olympic final, Tim Mack and Toby Stevenson, the man who had the year's top jump at 6 meters (19-8 ¼), jumped third and fourth, respectively. The two top guns would fire back-to-back like duelists.

Mack and coach Jim Bemiller had made a minute study of Olympic Stadium. It had the same configuration as Hornet Stadium at Sacramento State at the Olympic Trials, with the two pole vault runways on the crown (the slight rise that allows the field to drain) at the end of the field.

"I had talked to the coach of Mike Tully, the 1984 silver medalist in the pole vault, who has done a lot of work on stride pattern," Bemiller said. "It was the same problem as Sacramento. You run uphill and then downhill. In the elite facilities in the United States, the pits are parallel to the straight-aways, so you get less swirling wind and no crown. When you run the uphill part, you have to keep your posture. You also don't cover as much ground because it's uphill, so you move your starting marks up a little. When you start downhill, you turn it over (stride) faster, and you cover ground faster."

Five men had jumped six meters going into qualifying --Stevenson; Dmitri Markov, from Belarus, now jumping for Australia; the German pair of Tim Lobinger and Danny Ecker; and South Africa's Okert Brits. Mack would cross the threshold of greatness, clearing 6.01 meters (19-8 1/2) shortly after the Olympics. Australia's Paul Burgess would do so in 2005. That meant half of the fourteen men in history who would clear the golden bar were competing in Athens.

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Chasing Sergey a story in itself

by Bill Livingston

Monday August 18, 2008, 1:00 AM

This is one of those story-behind-the-story stories.

I could not write my book about the sport of pole vaulting and Olympic gold medalist Tim Mack from Westlake and St. Ignatius, entitled "Above & Beyond," without talking to the greatest pole vaulter ever, Sergey Bubka of Ukraine.

(I know, I know, field event fans. Cornelius Warmerdam made such good use of rigid poles in the 1930s and '40s that nothing but feeding time for the pandas at the zoo topped him for practical use of bamboo. Still, to all pole vaulters today, Bubka rules).

After e-mailing Bubka, who has held the world record in the event for 24 years, with a sample list of questions; after being told Bubka preferred to do the Q-and-A by telephone instead; after weeks without contact; after Mack's agents came up with a cell phone number for him in Donetsk, Bubka's hometown in Ukraine -- I finally started calling him in March 2005.

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Above & Beyond Part 5: Sergey Bubka and pole-vaulting excellence

by Bill Livingston

Monday August 18, 2008, 12:55 AM

Bubka would go over the bar screaming like an eagle singing to the wild sky. No wonder the Europeans called him “The Birdman.”

THE PLANE DRONED over what used to be Mother Russia, as it took the world's best pole-vaulters on the final leg of their annual pilgrimage to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

They sat in their seats with their teeth chattering and their breath frosting in the chilled air. Because there was no baggage compartment, their poles were stacked as high as the seat backs in the center aisle. Former American record-holder Jeff Hartwig was perched atop them. He is a free spirit who lives in a house with a basement containing 145 snakes--primarily pythons and boa constrictors--plus a copperhead rattlesnake, two iguanas, five turtles, two alligators, and a monitor lizard.

Perhaps Hartwig, at the time the American record-holder, was simply trying to channel the spirit of a cat, the better to land on all fours in the event of an emergency landing on the frozen steppes. "When I saw the photo of Hartwig on top of those poles in the aisle, I almost fainted dead away," said Tim Mack's mother Arlene.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has gone into the dustbin of history. The men who aim themselves for the stars come back every February in Ukraine for a pole-vaulters-only meet. They come to Donetsk: the home of Sergey Bubka.

In Donetsk, Bubka's startling physical talent combined with a state-supported athletic system to create the greatest pole-vaulter ever. Bubka was ten years old when he first picked up a pole. It was like King Arthur drawing the sword from the stone. While many pole-vaulters don't peak until their twenties or even thirties due to the extremely technical nature of the event and its enormous physical demands, Bubka profited from the same, consistent model of technique from his formative years onward. He won a World Championship at 19.

"I got all the information I could on the event. I read all I could about it. It is a tough, hard event. But it is also very pleasant. I devoted everything to it. It was my life," he said.

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Above & Beyond Part 4: Rev. Bob Richards, Don Bragg and Bob Seagren

by Bill Livingston

Sunday August 17, 2008, 5:53 AM

“That bar bounced and bounced. It hung on the pegs by one-quarter of an inch. I lay there in the pit with my hands together as if praying, thinking, ‘Oh, God. It's coming off.’ ”

Bob Richards on his way to a gold medal in the 1952 Olympics.

THE POLE VAULT -- the most technologically advanced, adventure-filled event in track and field -- represents all the innocence, bravado, and magic of childhood.

The most colorful pole-vaulter, the rambunctious, flamboyant 1960 Olympic gold medalist, Don Bragg, swung on ropes hanging from trees, screaming the falsetto war cry of Tarzan. He had idolized the silver screen's " King of the Apes," Johnny Weissmuller, since boyhood.

"There was a picture of me in Sports Illustrated where the angle made it look like I was up there in the third balcony of Madison Square Garden," said the Rev. Bob Richards, one of the sport's first stars.

"The caption said the pole vault is a symbol of human achievement, of jumping on a flimsy pole and trying to do the impossible. It said it was a symbol of the venturesome spirit."

Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin , in fact, was once a pole-vaulter. The second man to walk on the surface of the moon, Aldrin was jumping into great adventures on the end of a pole as a teenager in Montclair, New Jersey, years before the Eagle landed.

The Vaulting Vicar

In 1956 Richards should not have become the only pole-vaulter to repeat as Olympic gold medalist. He should have been beaten by Georgios Roubanis of Greece, who used the first fiberglass pole in Olympic pole-vaulting competition.

Roubanis improved his personal best by 3½ inches but settled for the bronze medal. Roubanis got great lift, but he had not mastered the trajectory of the new-fangled gadget and kept coming down on the crossbar rather than behind it.

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Above & Beyond Part 3: Tim Mack and the psychology of pole vaulting

by Bill Livingston

Saturday August 16, 2008, 12:49 PM

The Goodwill Games victory “was $15,000 after taxes. At the time, that was living expenses for a year for me.”

VISITORS TO JOE WHITNEY'S sports psychology office at the University of Tennessee must follow a maze of staircases and hallways in Stokely Athletics Complex to reach it and the "Mork Room" contained inside.

At the highest level of the Olympics, the physical abilities of pole-vaulters are very nearly equal. The difference between them becomes their mental acuity. "Tim Mack has a great ability to play and to focus. He is very accurate in assessing his strengths and weaknesses," Whitney said.

In Whitney's office sits an "Alpha chair." "It looks like a big, white egg, like Mork from Ork," said Mack.

It was there that Mack's dreams of empire were, well, hatched.

The chair is acoustically designed and, with its ovoid shape, looks like the makings of a giant's breakfast. The athlete sits inside it, the lights are turned off, and his head is soon wrapped in surround sound. For from twelve to twenty minutes, the athlete listens to either music (Eminem's "Lose Yourself " for Mack) or to Whitney's pre-recorded, personalized cd's. It's like having Knute Rockne muttering in your ear about the Gipper.

"Music is an emotional primer," Whitney said. "We practice getting to the emotional state we want the athlete in at the meet."

By 2004, Mack and Whitney had a past that went back for years. With Whitney's visualization exercises, Mack was able to imagine the sights and sounds of the Olympic Stadium in Athens before he even got there - down to the tunnel to the field, the smell of food cooking, the Olympic flame blazing overhead. As a result, nothing surprised him in Greece.

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Above & Beyond Part 2: Tim Mack at the University of Tennessee

by Bill Livingston

Friday August 15, 2008, 4:46 PM

“I did wonder if I was going to have the means to the end. From graduation until I won the Goodwill Games in 2001, it was a question of barely making it.”

WHEN MACK CAME TO the University of Tennessee, it was as a backup singer to the headline act that was Lawrence Johnson. Pole vault aficionados know that Sergey Bubka flew alone at the top of the sport, but for sheer athletic ability, Lawrence Johnson, was a respectable second.

The first great black pole vaulter, Johnson talked of clearing 21 feet (10 inches above Bubka's world record) in the pole vault, after which he would -- like Michelangelo taking up his chisel again because the Sistine Chapel was, literally, the ceiling of painting possibilities -- devote his time to the decathlon.

"If you looked at us standing side by side, 10 out of 10 people would have said Lawrence would win the gold medal," Mack said.

Injuries took a ferocious toll on Johnson, for the pole vault, a "hit pit" as Mack's coach calls it, is an event that cannibalizes its young. But "LoJo" (nicknamed after the great sprinter FloJo, Florence Griffith Joyner) did win the silver medal in Sydney in 2000.

Mack had to wait longer and go through many changes before he would be the one to win the gold.

He started with almost nothing. Coach Jim Bemiller sold his old car to Mack for $200 after Tim graduated.. The car was an indeterminate color located at the confluence of soot and grime where they form crud. "It had 130,000 miles on it. It was originally white, but it was so dirty you couldn't clean it if you tried. We're talking layers of dirt baked into it.

That thing was a death-trap," said Mack.

"His roommates killed him about the car," Bemiller said,

Eventually, Mack wrecked the car in an ice storm, while driving to a job he hated - packing tea bags at a factory. Mack jubilantly pumped his fist. "I totaled that thing! I'm saved! " he cried. "I don't have to go to work, and I'll never have to drive that car again!"

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Above & Beyond Part 1: Tim Mack at St. Ignatius

by Bill Livingston

Friday August 15, 2008, 3:46 PM

“Don’t be afraid of defeat. It’s okay to fail. But, embrace it; don’t run from it. Learn from it.”

ON TIM MACK DAY at the end of September in 2004 at St. Ignatius High School, everyone wanted a glimpse of the gold medal.

Teachers approached the medal with a sense of wonder. A Greek teacher photocopied both sides of the medal in order to translate the medal's Greek inscription that was taken from a victory ode the poet Pindar composed when the ancient Olympics were held in Olympia.

"Is it legal to Xerox a gold medal?" asked Mack's old coach, Chuck "Chico" Kyle.

"The first thing I thought of when I won is that I did not want this to change me as a person," Mack said, as the photocopier whirred and flashed. "The gold medal is something bigger than I am. I always had an image of what gold medal winners were like. You know, people like Jesse Owens. That I am actually one of them is surreal."

When the school assembly bell rang, students filed into the gym, an army of young boys in khakis, shirts, and ties. Many of them stopped in their tracks when they saw the towering uprights, with the bar set at Mack's Olympic record height of 19 feet, 6¼ inches. You could imagine the students thinking: He did what? He went how high? Dude, do you get peanuts and a soft drink on a flight like that?

No one from Cuyahoga County, had won an Olympic gold medal in an individual event since 1968 until Mack did it on August 27, 2004.

By the way, the Greek teacher finally translated the inscription, which was written in a dialect used in the sixth century B.C. The classical scholars translated it as: "Mistress of golden-crowned contests, Olympia, queen of the truth."

But the truth is no one saw this coming.

Did I see greatness in Tim?" said Kyle. "To be honest, no."

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Above & Beyond: Tim Mack, the Pole Vault, and the Quest for Olympic Gold

by Bill Livingston

Friday August 15, 2008, 3:45 PM

ABOVE & BEYOND" by Plain Dealer sports columnist Bill Livingston tells the story of Tim Mack, a graduate of St. Ignatius High School.

As a pole vaulter, Mack didn't even make the state meet in high school. But his performance rose steadily, at Malone College in Canton and the University of Tennessee. He surprised the world with a win at the Goodwill Games in 2001, and set an Olympic record in winning the gold medal in 2004.

Livingston's book, from the Kent State University Press, puts Mack's accomplishments in the context of the dangerous and demanding sport of pole vaulting. He touches on the careers of some of the sport's legends, from the only two-time Olympic winner, Rev. Bob Richards, to the flamboyant but injury-prone Sergey Bubka.

Beginning today, The Plain Dealer offers online excerpts from "Above & Beyond," tracing Tim Mack's life and explaining the risks and challenges of the sport he pursues. New excerpts will be published online every day through Tuesday, Aug. 19.