Dark Horse

No one wants to be like Sergey. Not in the United States, not in a sports culture dominated by ESPN SportsCenter highlights and instant gratification. Besides, there is no playground culture to pole-vaulting, the sport Ukrainian Sergey Bubka mastered the way an angel does clouds.

But Tim Mack was a pole-vaulter, and thus, throughout his adolescence and adulthood, he was different. Even among pole-vaulters, who usually belong to the fraternity of daredevils and a society of swagger, he stood apart. More cerebral than visceral, a sort of thinking man’s stunt man, he thought himself over the bar as much as he led a banzai charge on it. Like every pole-vaulter of his generation, he looked up to Bubka in the same way that every basketball player who wanted to be like Mike looked up to Michael Jordan. A poster of the Ukrainian legend hung on Mack’s bedroom wall throughout high school and college.

On the last day of September in the Olympic year of 2004, Mack parked his black Mitsubishi Montero, with the Cleveland Browns license plate, in the tiny faculty parking lot at St. Ignatius High School, located only a mile or so from downtown Cleveland. It was easy to spot his SUV, because a willowy white fiberglass vaulting pole was lashed to the baggage rack on the roof.

To appreciate where Mack was then in the high, golden sun of a perfect autumn morning, you had to know where he had been. He was, in a sport in which men try to reach unreachable bars, the impossible dream come true. If you knew the story, the pole could have been a lance and the truck Rocinante, Don Quixote’s horse.

It was “Tim Mack Day” at his alma mater, as the Jesuit all-boys school honored the Athens Olympics pole vault gold medalist with a lunch and a rally. At lunch, Mack’s mother, Arlene, after a sneaky shopping trip to Great Northern Mall near their house in suburban Westlake, presented Tim with a secret weapon: a Superman T-shirt. There were times in his life when, both knowingly and unknowingly, he had done impressions of a comic book superhero—tying a towel around his neck to trail behind him on a dive into the waters of an abandoned rock quarry as part of a hazing ritual or taking his victory lap in Athens while holding an American flag that streamed behind him like the stars and stripes forever. But Mack knew the truth behind the joke. Super powers were not the reason he had won. He had dug the secrets of the pole vault out of the steel “box,” the launching pad where the pole slammed down; he had rooted in the ground of his coach’s yard for them; he had tinkered with makeshift contraptions of his own devising to correct his posture and increase his strength; in a notebook, he had entered everything he skimmed off the occasional glories of success or gleaned from the mounting rubble of failure.

“Thanks, Mom. This won’t get any attention,” Mack said, examining the T-shirt with the block “S” on it.

As the teenagers ate, Mack shuffled from table to table and visited with them. Everyone wanted a glimpse of the gold medal. The students goggled at it as they asked for his autograph on their T-shirts, book bags, laptop computers, and Gatorade bottles. The teachers also 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.”

The most recognizable athletic bauble in the world, an Olympic gold medal isn’t really gold; it’s sterling silver that has been gilded with at least six grams of gold (about one-fifth of an ounce). Of course, it isn’t the metal that makes it so valuable, but the mettle it took to win it. That day in Cleveland, it seemed as if no woman who had ever accepted a ring from a beau on bended knee had to show off her hardware as often as Mack did.

If the gold wasn’t enough to impress the students and faculty at St. Ignatius High School, the uprights were. Not content to leave Mack’s feat to imagination or a televised memory, Kyle had moved the standards, crossbar, and box into Sullivan gym. That way, the 1,400 students attending the afternoon rally could see just what an amazing feat one of their own had accomplished.

The high school pole vault standards at St. Ignatius were too short to match Mack’s flight, so carpenters added a wooden extension on each side until the crossbar rested at 19 feet, 6¼ inches (5.95 meters). In Athens, under the pressure of the Olympic final, against the world’s best, on his third and last attempt, Mack had gone where no man had gone before in Olympic history to clear that bar. Maybe only Mack could have felt at home, dwarfed by those extended uprights but ready to make the thin air the stuff of dreams.

He certainly knew his way around the weathered pole vault pit at the school. Years ago, you might have seen Mack rolling the standards out for practice with a hardy buddy or two in the dead of winter, brushing the snow off the runway, stripping off his coat and gloves until he had pared himself down to an efficient aerodynamic profile, and then, running toward the uprights, lowering the pole as he thundered closer. He would have seemed then a knight who was jousting with fear and failure, one who had been splintered by them more often than most competitors would have been able to endure. And finally, years later, after disappointment and defeat, he had succeeded wildly beyond all dreams except his own.

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. Behind the pole vault pit, a huge drawing of Mack with the gold medal hung on the gym wall. You could see 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, where Cleveland is located, 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.

It’s impossible to quantify brilliance precisely. As was once written, “you don’t rate sunsets by their readings on a light meter.” However, the pole vault is such a visually stunning event, its spectacle is so grand, that adding this literal measurement on the basketball court for all of the students and faculty to see to the very inch what Mack did in Athens, Greece, only made the tale taller.

In some ways, the pole vault conveys the meaning of competition more precisely than any other sport. It reflects both the idea of athletics as a ruthless meritocracy and society’s hopes for improvement. Educators are always talking about raising the bar. Students are always seeking new heights. In pole-vaulting, you always know if you have succeeded or failed. But so many variables must be accounted for, so much energy is required, and so high is the fear factor that improvement comes in small increments.

Timothy Steven Mack is Exhibit A for the value of self-improvement, one hard-earned smidgen at a time. The comforting philosophy of progress, put to rout by the calamitous wars of the 20th century, scarred by the tracks of needles used to administer steroids and other performance-enhancers in track and field, finds its champion in him.

You don’t have to be a prodigy like LeBron James or Tiger Woods. It’s not what you were, but what you are that counts. Yet while winners sometimes cheat in track and field, no sport should be more removed from the “winning is the only thing” mentality. There are many, many more losers than winners in the sport. That’s why PRs (personal records) are so important. They represent a melioristic view of the world. Things will get better. Improving oneself is the most important thing.

“It’s an individual sport, and that intimidates some kids,” said Kyle. “They’re fine if they’re part of the football team or if they’re on the relay. But it takes a special breed to lay it on the line when it’s just you.”

In the pole vault, there is no complaining that your teammates didn’t throw you the ball; no griping about the run that would have gone all the way except for the missed block. Elite competitors have coaches, sports psychologists, and trainers. But at the most basic level, in the jump itself, it is all up to the pole-vaulter.

Pole-vaulters have a startling, sometimes contradictory blend of skills: speed enough in their last steps to be in the ballpark with sprinters, strength enough to make them the likeliest candidates to move the furniture in a room full of extreme sports participants like skateboarders, flexibility enough to rival the human pretzels in gymnastics, and, always, courage enough to dare.

Lean, swift and sinewy at 6-foot-2, 175 pounds, Mack, like all pole-vaulters, is overpowering in strength-to-weight ratio. His biceps are Popeye’s after a spinach infusion. His upper body came from lifting over his lifetime a slag heap from the steel mills that once belched smoke into Cleveland’s skies.

As for the courage, pole-vaulters all have it. They don’t lift off from the runway without it. The pole vault is, per capita, the most dangerous school sport in America, and by a wide margin over football. A world-class skier once said, “A coward will never win the downhill.” The same can be said about the pole vault. It seems to appeal to skywalkers with stars in their eyes, but no one turns himself into a catapult’s payload without having gravel in his gut.

“There’s a camaraderie in track and field, especially in the pole vault,” said Kyle. “They respect each other’s technique and training, and they respect each other’s courage. It’s almost a fraternity. When another pole-vaulter is on the runway, it’s like they’re bringing another brother into the lodge.”

Mack came to the event not from an internal imperative to conquer his fears, although he was afraid of heights. He was drawn to the topsyturvy world by default.

“It was,” Mack said, simply, “something I was halfway decent at.”

The quality that would take him to Athens was there even then. Tim Mack was the most persistent and least daunted kid in his neighborhood or any other. Like snow on the iron-hard ground of late fall in northern Ohio, like tape, like your shadow, he stuck to it.

“It’s always been a part of me. I’d be in the batting cages for an hour at a time before baseball season. I would be out on the sidewalk when I started doing the pole vault, working on drills, working against the side of the house, doing it alone. I always had to prove myself. My back was always against the wall,” Mack said.

Even then, he connected with coaches. These were the days before every child got to play in football, before every participant received ribbons in track and field, before self-esteem was held more valuable than excellence. When the coaches chose teams while Mack was in middle school, they almost always wanted “Timmy Mack” on their side. He had good hands, he took instruction well, and he wanted to improve like a fish wanted to swim.

He came to the pole vault because he was too small for football. He started out in the eighth grade, 13 years old, standing in a chair beneath the crossbar, holding a pole, visualizing the plant of the pole. His best height was 6 feet. It was the very bottom-most rung of a very tall ladder.

He left it for one year to play shortstop in baseball at St. Ignatius, but he didn’t bat much, and he was one of the last players into the junior varsity games. The most complicated, demanding, expensive and perilous event in track and field became his specialty, because nothing else was.

There is absolutely nothing ordinary about committing body and soul to a flimsy pole that bends like a rainbow under a storm front. With your hands above your head, reaching for heaven, you hear a voice in your head screaming: “Surely this time it snaps like a twig and frags everybody in the neighborhood.” And then you are performing thirty-two distinct muscular maneuvers in a half-second, while you hurtle upward, feet first, hanging on the pole like a bat in a cave. Your back is to the crossbar as you fly more blindly for a time than a pilot with the instrument panel on the blink and the landing strip socked in by fog.

“The pole vault is always the event decathletes are scared of,” said Kyle. He was referring to the failure of Dan O’Brien, one half of Reebok’s “Dan vs. Dave” ubiquitous commercials in 1992, to clear a bar (“no-heighting,” as it is called) at that year’s U.S. Olympic Trials.

“You can muscle some events,” added Kyle, “but not the pole vault. You have to have the technique.

“But did I see greatness in Tim? To be honest, no. Tim was very good as a freshman, and he was going to be one of those guys who could really move up. I thought he might do 13 or 14 feet. Then he took the year off for baseball. I remember dragging the pole vault equipment out of the shed and seeing him in his baseball uniform, waving goodbye as the van pulled out.”

The year away sent him back to vaulting, more determined than ever. “It was a blessing in disguise. He came back more dedicated. He had found something to latch onto,” said Kyle.

In many ways, however, it was St. Ignatius that had latched onto him. St. Ignatius High School is a college preparatory school, a Jesuit school, and not a lot of corners are cut there. The Jesuits were the shock troops of the pope before that distinction went more appropriately to the right-wing Opus Dei. Organized basically to lead the Counter-Reformation, they were the Roman Catholic Church’s intellectuals, known for their powers of reasoning and for their diplomacy. If there was an ecclesiastical beachhead to be taken, the Jesuits were the “Marines” whom the pope sent in. Former students at St. Ignatius are CEOs of companies all around Cleveland. The character B.D. from the comic strip Doonesbury was modeled on Brian Dowling, the quarterback at Yale in the 1960s. Dowling was a St. Ignatius man, class of 1964.

“I wouldn’t be the person I am without going there,” Mack said. “I had to work hard just to have a decent grade point average. I didn’t want to fall below a 2.0. I struggled to get stuff done. See, school was not always for me. I knew I was going to graduate, but my attitude was, ‘I don’t want to fail a lot of classes.’ College was a breeze for me after that. Preparing to pole vault was nothing like trying to keep my head above the water academically.”

Part of the rigor came from Kyle, who also teaches English at the school. The text Chico Kyle really gets into is Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. When he speaks about the short novel, it is as if Kyle himself were in the rocking boat with Santiago, trying to keep the sharks away from the great marlin he has caught. “You know he’s not going to make it back with the fish,” Kyle said, “but he still puts up a great fight.” Persistence, the book argues, has its own value. Hard work lends a kind of nobility to even the most thankless task. The fish isn’t the trophy. The value isn’t in the sea but in what the fisherman found inside himself.

Mack learned lessons from Kyle’s books and from his home life. Tim Mack was the youngest of the five children of Arlene and Don Mack. His father was the best punter in Cleveland while attending St. Ignatius in the 1950s. He played briefly at Notre Dame before winding up at John Carroll University. When the realty tax agency for which Don worked began to fail, he formed his own company and paid Catholic school tuition with sheer hustle. “I was 52 when I was let go. Oh, I was down in the dumps for a while, but I had friends among my old customers. I tried not to let on to Tim,” said Don Mack.

Tim Mack once said his mother “keeps it real.” By this, he meant she is not satisfied with poor performance and she does not brook excuses. There was a reason for that. Arlene Mack has coped with multiple sclerosis for twenty-five years. It forced her to give up the dog-grooming business she had in her home until Tim began the first grade, because the grooming shears became too heavy to hold in her weakened right hand. She had learned the trade by working for free for months at pet salons, clipping and shaving the animals, getting bitten once through the thumbnail, all so she could one day augment the family’s income. Later, she worked in the marketing department of the real estate firm headed by Richard Jacobs, former owner of the Cleveland Indians. She kept her affliction a secret when she took falls. She made excuses when she had to give up racquetball and bowling. Arlene Mack was never one who wanted to be the object of sympathy. She now wears a brace on her right leg that corrects the drop foot condition that is a symptom of MS. The device helps her walk in a normal, heel-to-toe manner.

Arlene’s illness is never completely out of Tim’s mind. In 2006, a year and a half after his gold medal, her son would fly to parched, dusty Odessa, Texas, the hometown of Toby Stevenson. There, Mack and Stevenson, the high-flying rivals in Athens, Jeff Hartwig, the American record-holder, and Nick Hysong, the 2000 Olympic gold medalist, headed a contingent of pole-vaulters in a benefit meet to fund research into multiple sclerosis. Stevenson’s mother Peggy died in 2008 from a more advanced form of MS than Arlene Mack. The pole-vaulters raised over $20,000 in donations and pledges at the Odessa event.

Mack’s family was middle class, but the family’s transportation system was not divisible by five children. So Tim Mack endured the small character-builders of having to ride his bike in football pads two miles to practice. “I’d get there and see all these other kids who had rides when they needed something,” he said.

Since his birthday was in September, he was usually the youngest in his grade. He grew up a have-not, although not in the sense of grinding material deprivation. “I was the youngest and the smallest. The other kids got their size and coordination before me. I had to fight for everything I got,” he said.

At St. Ignatius, he learned to fight for others as well. “The motto of St. Ignatius is ‘Men for others.’ All the people who worked with me gave the example to treat other people as I wanted to be treated. It sounds simple. But it’s hard to do,” said Mack.

The Prayer of Generosity of St. Ignatius Loyola says it best: “Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not count the cost; to fight and not heed the wounds; to toil and not seek for rest; to labor and not ask for reward, except to know that I am doing your will. Amen.”

You could find those values reflected in Tim Mack. Pole-vaulting was his passion, but it never became his identity. He would give his time to tutor friends spurned by their coaches. He would toil at menial jobs without rest, almost pursuing his athletic career in his spare time. For years, his rewards certainly weren’t measured on a material scale.

The altruistic ideal is more difficult to detect in adolescents than in others. Parents at St. Ignatius check a list periodically to determine progress in being open to growth, intellectually competent, religious, and committed to justice.

The Jesuit goal is to create a sort of Catholic aristocracy, or maybe intellectual aristocracy. Still, as part of its commitment to reaching out to others, the school has remained at its inner-city, near–West Side location, resisting alumni calls to relocate to the suburbs. It’s both a commitment to the urban community and a way of making students leave their suburban capsules. Perhaps it means that students from all over the Cleveland area get panhandled in an area that has seen better days, but maybe that is part of the education as well, a bump from the harder school waiting on the outside.

Mack’s world grew wider there. As in life, some of what he encountered wasn’t particularly pleasant. He learned from all of it.

“Tim always talks about being so lucky and having so many people support him,” Kyle said. “But he’s the kind of guy people like to be around. He’s kind, sincere, soft spoken. Nobody doesn’t like Tim.”

Mack walls himself off from distractions at a meet, refusing to watch his competitors’ jumps, intensifying his isolation. He lies on his back with his feet up, a visor keeping the sun off and tunneling his vision, the focus growing narrower until it finally reaches the pinpoints of light that are Mack’s jumping “cues,” which are seemingly dry, dull reminders about arm movement and posture. But Mack knew there were influences beyond his own skills lifting him up. In Athens, he called together his entire circle of family and friends after he won the gold medal and thanked them individually for helping to make it possible.

The gold medal had defined Tim Mack, for he would always be linked with the great track and field names of his hometown’s past— Jesse Owens, a four-time gold medalist and one-man rebuke to Hitler’s Master Race at the Berlin Olympics in 1936; Harrison Dillard, a two-time gold medalist and the only man to win the 100 meters and the 110-meter hurdles, in 1948 and 1952, respectively; and Madeline Manning, the 800 meters golden girl in 1968.

But it’s what you do when you come down after clearing the bar that is in some ways even more important. Mack was always well grounded.

Tim Mack never made the high school state meet. His best jump at St. Ignatius was only a so-so 4.11 meters (13–5¾). This earned him a scholarship only to Malone College, a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) school in Canton, Ohio. Today, the NAIA seems an athletic backwater, ignored by television. But Malone had a strong pole-vaulting program then, regularly dusting Notre Dame and other NCAA schools. Pole-vaulting at Malone beat the alternative Mack faced of walking on and competing without a scholarship at the University of Toledo, which didn’t have a strong program.

At the high school rally for Mack, they showed a joke video of an old St. Ignatius teammate, Joe Zebrak, jumping in a dress shirt and tie and clearing “19–6¼.” It was actually only 10 feet, and Zebrak sailed futilely beneath the crossbar when it was adjusted to an actual height of 15 feet. Many of his old teammates would not have been surprised if Mack had turned out to be just like Zebrak, a 9-to-5 guy who was a pretty good track and field athlete in his day.

When Mack was introduced at last, the student body rose in a standing ovation and so many small American flags fluttered in the stands that the Fourth of July seemed to have stolen a march on the calendar. Mack strode through the gym’s rear door, holding the pole before him like Lancelot about to enter the tournament lists. A local boy had made good. He was a Clevelander, most of all. He had been defeated often, but it had never diminished him.

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

If ever anyone spoke to a crowd that had had a lifetime of opportunities to give defeat a hug, it was Mack to a Cleveland audience. Many of the boys had never seen a championship Cleveland team in a major professional sport, and the same could have been said about their fathers. The Browns’ last NFL championship came in 1964. The Indians’ last World Series championship came in 1948. The Cavaliers were swept in 2007 in their first trip to the NBA Finals.

It is natural in such a city to expect the worst. The Cavs might have won it all in the “Miracle of Richfield” year of 1976, except starting center Jim Chones broke his foot in practice the day before the conference finals against Boston began.

The Indians in 1997 became the first team ever to take a lead into the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series and lose. The Browns not only lost in the 1980s, they lost in ways that ripped the heart out of the city and the franchise. There was the 98-yard fairy tale authored by John Elway in 1986. There was Earnest Byner’s goal-line fumble in Denver the very next year. In Cleveland, the last two are simply known as “The Drive” and “The Fumble.” In Cleveland, the fairy tale always ends with the big, bad wolf winning.

Even the Cavs, a distant third in popularity most years, got into the act in 1989, losing an epic first-round series to the Chicago Bulls on Michael Jordan’s dagger to the heart at the final buzzer of the final game. It, of course, was known in Cleveland as “The Shot.”

When a city commemorates defeat so regularly, it can lead to a climate of self-pity. The culture of victimization was everywhere in Cleveland by 2004. No city needed a champion more, even if it was one with dents in his armor from years of disappointment.

Tim Mack was different in that he never considered himself a victim. Mack had heights to climb and not depths to plumb. In a cloudburst, he comforted himself with thoughts of the coming rainbow.

“He is just a great, shining example of persistence,” said Kyle. “So many people would have given up so many times. A big part of him is that he always stayed positive. He’d stop by school from time to time. I’d ask how it was going, and it was never, ‘I really screwed that meet up.’ It was always optimistic. ‘Oh, I’m working on a few things. I’m upbeat. It’s coming together.’”

He didn’t start with such equanimity. Like any other kid, he wanted gratification now, yesterday if possible. But the pole vault is not like gymnastics or figure skating, in which athletes hit their peak before the onset of puberty. Pole-vaulters slowly get the hang of the event. Bubka was an anomaly, winning the first of his six straight World Championships at the age of nineteen. For most pole-vaulters, however, the event is a struggle out of the old, bloody Greek dramas. “Over time, drop by drop, through suffering, we gain wisdom,” the tragedian Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century B.C. No wonder frustration got the better of Mack for years.

In a Mack family video from his senior year, a young spindly Mack competed in a meet in Sandusky, Ohio. His mother long ago made herself a vaulting aficionado, and while watching the video across the years, she barked, “His hands are wrong” as he held the pole. When he rocked back on his heel to begin the sprint to the box, she murmured, “That’s better.”

The pole in the video looked like a plaything compared to the one he had brought to St. Ignatius. Its bend was slight, but then again the bar was low. Twice, Mack missed, and each time he fired the end of his pole into the runway afterward like an explorer claiming a distant land for his king. It was a forlorn territory he came to know very well.

Over time, drop by drop, Mack made use of the patient wisdom that comes from morning drives in the Cleveland winter when the salt trucks haven’t been out, the Alberta Clipper is screaming down from Canada with its bone-chilling winds, and the traffic snarls would make Medusa’s hair with its snake ’do look orderly.

“I’m very proud of being from that city. I very much consider myself a Cleveland guy. Hard-working, blue-collar. When I first took my girlfriend, Grace Upshaw, to Cleveland, I showed her the smokestacks,” Mack said. “She’s from California, so Cleveland was a whole new world. I told her, ‘This is what Cleveland is about. This is what I’m about.’ The city has had its heart broken so many times by its teams, but it hasn’t lost its love for them.”

After Mack’s speech at his alma mater, he stood near the bleachers as the boys formed a line that wound almost all the way around the basketball court. He shook hands with every student who wanted to meet him. In his hometown, he was a great success. Indeed, he would win the award for Cleveland’s Best Amateur Athlete for 2004. Mack is not really an amateur, but the category was created to give Olympic athletes recognition. He would never have beaten the winner of the award as Cleveland’s Best Professional Athlete for 2004. That, of course, was LeBron James, a global celebrity before he was eighteen years old.

If Mack stood somewhat apart from his pole vault peers, Mack and the USA men’s Olympic basketball were a study in contrasts. By the summer of 2004, it was a team to which no one was attaching the adjective “dream.” The youngest team since the NBA players replaced collegians in 1992, it was also the least experienced in the professional era. The players were new to the international game and its rules. They symbolized to many the way basketball skills in the country of the sport’s origin had atrophied, sacrificed on the altar of individual athleticism.

One of the key members of that Olympic team, LeBron James had entered the NBA as the most publicized rookie ever. He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated while he was a junior at Akron’s St. Vincent–St. Mary High School under the screaming headline: “The Chosen One.” As a senior, he was declared ineligible by the state high school governing board (a ban which was soon overturned by lawyers representing the school) for taking costly “throwback” jerseys from a sporting news store as gifts.

His future was already so bright, assured and imminent that his unemployed mother, Gloria, was able to use his potential NBA earnings as collateral to buy him some wheels for his 18th birthday. It wasn’t just a car, but the biggest, baddest, in-your-face vehicle on the planet, a Hummer outfitted with three TV sets and leather upholstery embossed with the nickname King James.

Mack, who could have vaulted over it, was riding a borrowed bicycle while working on his master’s degree.

When the Cavs won his draft rights in the lottery, it probably saved the franchise in Cleveland. By then, LeBron James was set for life. He signed a Nike sneaker contract for $90 million, plus a $10 million signing bonus, before he ever played a professional game. Coca-Cola, another global marketing giant, wanted a piece of him for its Sprite commercials.

So great was his fame, and so long was the reach of the NBA’s marketing arm, that a reporter from Cleveland felt their touch in the dusty town of Megara, Greece, an hour’s drive northwest of Athens, three days before the Olympic Games. Hassled by Greek Secret Service agents as he covered the leg of the Olympic torch relay run by a Greek-American from Cleveland, the reporter tried in vain to identify the hometown link that justified his presence on the sun-blistered road. He mentioned the Cleveland Browns and national champion Ohio State, only to be met by blank stares and shrugs of indifference.

“LeBron James? Cleveland Cavaliers?” the reporter said finally, mimicking a jump shot.

“Oh, I love NBA! What is LeBron really like?” shouted the Greek Secret Service man who had been giving him the third degree, as he wrapped his arm around the reporter’s shoulders.

LeBron had that kind of name recognition. But if the Greek cop had wanted to meet a real American Olympian, it would have been a pole-vaulter.

The pole vault gratifies the American appetite for spectacle and still fulfills the austere Olympic ideal of commitment to excellence because nothing else will do.

There is to pole-vaulting almost nothing of instant gratification. It does not speak to the instinct for fame that is the engine driving such hit television shows as American Idol. The breezy, irresponsible disdain of basics typical of the Olympic basketball team cannot characterize pole-vaulting. An irresponsible pole-vaulter often is, chillingly, a dead pole-vaulter.

The slow-motion camera loves the pole vault the way NFL Films loves power sweeps on the “frozen tundra.” The pole vault is what Baryshnikov would have done if he had sprinter’s speed, what Evel Knievel would have done if he hadn’t discovered motorcycles. Its relative obscurity has given the pole vault something of a cult appeal. It’s the odds-on choice to elicit more “oohs” and “ahs” from fans than any other event in track and field. Yet a recent poll ranked track and field as America’s twenty-fifth favorite activity. The explanation was fairly simple, according to Mack’s great rival, Toby Stevenson. You can throw a football around with your buddies, throw a baseball around with your dad, or shoot baskets by yourself. It takes considerably more trouble to set up a pole vault pit.

All that the pole vault offered fans was a treehouse dream of freedom that is similar to the way a dunk makes a heaven of a playground. In fact, the very reason the pole vault exists is to raise the bar and make the spirit soar. Its objective is to take you higher. Pole-vaulters are sky pilots, trying to touch the sky.

In some ways, the basketball team, which scratched and scraped to win a bronze medal, seemed a grotesque mockery of the Olympic ideal of self-sacrifice. The players lived on a luxury cruise ship. Allen Iverson reported to “boot camp” in Jacksonville, Florida, in a stretch limousine that covered the distance from “ostentatious, if-you-got-it, flaunt-it” luxury to “possible symptom of megalomania.”

Even the great prodigy, James, had a mechanical flaw in his jump shot, often fading backwards when he did not have to, which threw off his balance and kept his shoulders from “squaring up” to the basket.

A pole-vaulter would have no-heighted with such slipshod technique.

In the world of Olympic celebrities, Tim Mack was, literally, the other pole. He had sharpened his skills during years of toil, often in obscurity, without the guarantee of a sultan’s lifestyle, before he ever competed in a single meet, without “street cred,” driven solely by his own imperative to go higher.

When Mack and the Cavaliers met, the franchise made him a sideshow to a sideshow before the game began. In a way, it figured. The NBA is all too often about style, not substance. On December 21, 2004, the Cavs invited Mack to be the team’s “sixth man” for a game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. Mack, an avid sports fan, quickly agreed. His parents bought four pricey seats only six rows behind the Cavs bench for themselves, Tim, and his young nephew.

Most sports fans, no matter their age, harbor a twelve-year-old inside them. The eternal twelve-year-old talked baseball in his day, Willie, Mickey and the Duke. He listened to daytime World Series games on a transistor radio, smuggled by the grade school Resistance into classrooms. That twelve-year-old never really goes away. He resurfaces in curiosity, in flaring sparks of interest, even in enthusiasms.

Pole-vaulting could have been an “I’m the king of the world!” moment at the top of the jungle gym, for the sports twelve-year-old in Cleveland today relates to LeBron and the air up there. The connection to Mack, however, was lost on the self-absorbed Cavaliers. They showed no highlights of the last-gasp gold medal, when Mack went up like a shooting star.

Mack had met James briefly at the Opening Ceremonies in Athens and had had his picture taken with him. “He didn’t seem all that interested in talking,” said Mack. In fact, James seemed most interested in socializing with Akron-born 200-meter female sprinter LaShaunte’a Moore.

The night of the game, Mack brought a digital camera with him and snapped pictures constantly. But he didn’t get to meet with James at all. Before the game began, Mack stood a couple of feet from the baseline on the court, across from the Cavs’ bench, and introduced himself. There was no caterwauling, rabble-rousing public address system intro for him, even though the team’s public address announcer greets each Cavaliers starter as if he invented the electric light.

“I’m Tim Mack, the pole vault gold medalist at the Athens Olympics,” Tim said. Then, his voice spiking, he cried: “Cavaliers fans! Are you readyyyyyyyy?”

And then the furry mascot, Moondog, raced onto the court, as the T-and-A show of the Cavs’ cheerleaders danced in his wake. The house lights went off, and spotlights picked out every starter as he was introduced, with James’ name drowned out by the roars. In the entire 20,562-seat arena, only Minnesota’s Kevin Garnett, with a gold medal from the Sydney Games in basketball, had what Mack had.

“You have a gold medal, and he only has a bronze,” a reporter said as Mack returned to his seat.

Mack smiled wistfully. “He has $100 million from Nike, though,” he said.

He didn’t want to seem ungrateful to the Cavs, so he said it wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t get to talk to James. Then Mack reached inside his Team USA jacket and pulled the gold medal out that hung from his neck. “I could have said, ‘Hey, man. This is what one looks like,’” he said.