Daredevils

Almost alone among athletes, pole-vaulters slip the bonds of earth and gravity. Pole-vaulters began as Lost Boys who dreamed of flying with Peter Pan. The pole vault—the most technologically advanced, adventurous event of them all—represents all the innocence, bravado, and magic of childhood.

Baseball is always the beneficiary of idealized childhood memories, of summer and school’s out, of green grass and high skies. Pole-vaulters seem to have enjoyed the same lyrical evocation of boyhood as Dylan Thomas described in the poem “Fern Hill.” They were “young and easy under the apple boughs.” From these boughs, the most colorful of them, the rambunctious, flamboyant Olympic gold medalist, Don Bragg, swung on ropes, screaming the falsetto war cry of Tarzan.

“When you really nail one,” said Bragg, “it’s almost mystical. You see it in segments instead of—whoosh—in a continuous flow. The swing. The rock back. The plant. The pull-up. On a great vault, you can look straight down the pole while doing a handstand on it. A flash goes off in your mind like a 35-millimeter camera.”

“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 the symbol of the venturesome spirit.”

Pole-vaulters don’t always start with the nonchalance of stunt men. But it becomes a big part of them. Richards, who is on the short list of the greatest vaulters ever, evolved into being a pole-vaulter. It was a function of his all-around athletic ability.

“It’s the greatest all-around event there is,” said Richards. “I played all sports. I was all-state in Illinois in football and averaged nineteen points per game in basketball. But no sport captivated me like the pole vault. It builds your upper body like nothing else. You have to do sprints in it. You use the same takeoff as in the [pre–Fosbury Flop] high jump and long jump. I set decathlon records because of pole-vaulting.”

Richards was world-ranked six times in the decathlon and three times was the American national champion in the ten-event competition. He never medaled in the event in the Olympics, finishing thirteenth in 1956, but he clearly had the ability to do so. No other pole-vaulter ever qualified for the Olympic decathlon.

Others came to pole-vaulting in the morning of their double-dog-dare-you youth. The air was their element. When they fell, it was not a punishment for their overweening pride—the sin that brought Icarus down in Greek myth, his wax wings melting as he flew too close to the sun. His story belongs on the dusty shelf of legend. In the spills from the garage roofs and apple boughs taken by young pole-vaulters, Icarus plunged then swam. Such events were the baptism of pole-vaulters, the anointing of their imaginative spirit. When they grew bigger, of course, they fell harder. Some of them died.

Pole-vaulters are off by themselves, separated from the rest of a track team by the rakish nature of their event. In the heights they reach, they make even high jumpers, with their backward rag-doll flops, seem gravity-bound. The pole-vaulters are all members of the same lodge: the Brotherhood of Big Air. As Arthur Miller wrote of a salesman’s imperative to dream, so a man with a pole has got to dare. Both come with the territory.

“You have the sprinters over here and the relay team over there; the big guys, the throwers are in their rings; and off by themselves in a corner of the field are the vaulters, the daredevil pilots at twelve o’clock high,” said Chico Kyle, Mack’s high school coach.

Sprinters preen and strut. Maurice Greene once had a friend spray his spikes with a fire extinguisher after the 100m dash. But pole-vaulters respect the game. A man can lose a lot more than a medal up there. And yet pole-vaulters are rebels, the cockeyed, asymmetrical, off-center individualists. “At the Pole Vault Summit,” Mack said, referring to an early-season meet and symposium held in Reno, Nevada, “they’re always telling us, ‘You are daredevils! You are stunt men!’” They are risktakers off the track, too. Mack, for example, plays Texas Hold ’em poker, slot machines, and roulette.

“A track coach told me once that it was easy to find pole-vaulters,” said Bragg, the 1960 Olympic gold medalist. “Maybe he was doing a presentation at school and there might be one kid at the back of the room who was standing with one foot on the back of his desk, ready to jump from it to the top of another desk. ‘There’s my pole-vaulter!’ the coach would yell.”

In some ways, Bragg’s name became his life story. He’s outrageous and outsized, self-described in his autobiographical book entitled A Chance to Dare as a “butt-end-of-everything kid from the New Jersey swamplands.” At Villanova, he steered the same kind of paths as the Delts at Faber College in Animal House. Double-secret probation was never more than an escapade away.

He and Richards, a theology professor and ordained minister, will always be linked because, as Bragg said, “We had almost a father-son relationship.” They were the premier pole-vaulters of the 1950s, when space flight was still a dream and the Cold War gave even athletic competition a militaristic cast. They represented a changing of the guard in the sport. Richards learned from Cornelius Warmerdam, the master of the bamboo pole. Bragg was the last champion to ride steel.

Bob Seagren followed as the sport entered a New Frontier of fiberglass. He was movie-star handsome and almost as wild-ass crazy as Bragg. In 1968 he won the Olympic gold medal. It was the sixteenth in a row for America and the last for thirty-two years. Even as the pole vault became an Eastern European–dominated sport filled with esoteric training regimens and suspicions of doping, Seagren both legitimized the event and popularized it with his countrymen. Ironically, it was accomplished in a made-for-television exhibition that is remembered as the first of a long line of “trash sports.”

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

Cornelius Warmerdam will never get his due. On the bamboo pole, he could fly like the Man of Steel. He was the Babe Ruth of the event in his era. Without question, Warmerdam is one of the ten greatest track and field athletes of all time. Interestingly, Warmerdam won no Olympic gold medals, perhaps only because there were no Olympics in his heyday. World War II wiped out the Olympics in 1940 and 1944.

Warmerdam learned to vault in a cabbage patch outside Fresno, California, in what can only be called the “Dead Pole Era.” Using bamboo, he set the type of records that should have belonged to the distant future. In 1940 Warmerdam became the first to clear 15 feet, or 4.57 meters. He accomplished that feat forty-three times in his career and set a record of 15–7¾ (4.77) that lasted fourteen years. No one else cleared 15 feet until Richards in 1951. Warmerdam retired in 1944 with a record height 9 inches (23 centimeters) better than his closest competitor. This is an astonishing feat when you consider the current record holder (Sergey Bubka) can claim only 10 centimeters (4 inches) as his margin.

Richards barely knew Warmerdam when he called him in Fresno, California, where “Dutch” became an outstanding track coach. “I was a foot below his record,” Richards said, “so I said to him, ‘Dutch, can you help me? I can’t get any higher.’”

For three days, Warmerdam worked with Richards. “He was a symbol of all the Dutch qualities, including high integrity,” said Richards. “Did you know that at the age of seventy he set a world record for his age?

“I had leveled off at 14–6 [4.42], so I went out to Fresno, and he shared his wisdom with me. I remember he asked me why I gave up on bamboo. Well, I thought I needed a stiffer pole,” Richards said. “That was the wisdom of the day. Stiffer was better, we thought. But he thought bamboo would give me more pop, more of a kick to get his record.”

Richards wrote a famous essay based on his relationship with Warmerdam for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. It was called “Greatness Is All Around You—Use It.” It is a sunny, optimistic view, invoking the generosity of Warmerdam’s competitive spirit.

“Great people will share. Great people will tell you their secrets,” Richards insisted. “Go where they are. It’s easy to be great when you’re around great people.”

THE VAULTING VICAR

An athlete was nothing in Richards’ day without a nickname. His ministry led him to be called the “Vaulting Vicar.” “The Pole-vaulting Parson” was another popular one.

“I never, ever believed any of the stuff people said that God wanted me to win the Olympics,” Richards said. “The kingdom of God is within you. God wants you to do your best. In my case, that was to be the best pole-vaulter, the best student, the best speaker. A Congressman once told me that God must have held the pole for me. Wasn’t that silly? The idea that God was interested in who won the pole vault?”

Just going by the hardware, Richards is the greatest pole-vaulter ever. He is the only repeat Olympic gold medalist (1952 and ’56). Richards also won a third medal, a bronze, in 1948. He was almost unbeatable indoors, winning the Millrose Games in New York eleven straight times. It is a remarkable record for a man whose body, superbly conditioned as it was, took a fearsome beating from the toll of falling from 15 feet into a pit filled with sawdust, if he were lucky, or often hard-packed sand if he were not.

He also beat back the challenge of the first fiberglass poles.

“That fiberglass pole was a whole new thing in the sport,” Richards said. “It was a revolutionary change. It put 4 or 5 more feet [in height] on the thing. And that’s when the dangerous aspects came into the sport.”

Novice pole vault observers might think poles snapping as vaulters catapult toward the sky pose the greatest danger, but improved technology and stricter weight-ratio rules have dramatically lessened the incidence of broken poles. Today, missed landings are the sport’s gravest danger.

“When I vaulted with a stiff metal pole, you never missed the pit,” Richards said. “I could tell you to a spot the size of a washrag where I was going to land. But you take fiberglass, which acted like a spring, a highly explosive force, and you ride it—that’s a different animal. That’s something you need a lot of experience to do.”

In 1956 Richards 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 (9 cm) but settled for the bronze medal. Roubanis got great lift, but he had not mastered the trajectory of the newfangled gadget and kept coming down on the crossbar rather than behind it. Richards needed his third and last try in 1956 to clear a shockingly low 13–1½ (4.00) in qualifying. The final in Melbourne, Australia, forced him to summon all the resources of a dedicated career plus a dollop of pure, dumb luck.

“The runway was patchy. It was made of brick dust, and we were all struggling,” said Richards. “It came down to me and Bob Gutkowski, and the bar was at 14–11½ (4.56). The wind was in our faces, and I hit the bar going over [on his second attempt]. That bar bounced and bounced. It hung on the pegs by one-quarter of an inch, and it was hanging down then. I lay there in the pit with my hands together as if praying, thinking, ‘Oh, God. It’s coming off.’ There is no question in my mind that the wind held it on.”

It was not the first time he defied the odds. “I had pulled my Achilles tendon in ’56, and it affected my takeoff in the jumps in both the decathlon [where he finished thirteenth] and pole vault,” Richards said. “In Helsinki in ’52, I pulled a hamstring. The first fiberglass pole certainly should have been the end of my streak in ’56.”

Great as he was on the runway, Richards might have been greater off it. A foe of Cold War stereotyping, he became a proponent of Olympic inclusiveness. His was not a spy vs. spy world of East vs. West but one of athletes without borders. In 1952 athletes from the former Soviet Union were allowed to compete for the first time. It was easy to cast the Olympians as surrogate warriors and the medal race as a contest to decide which political system was superior. Richards was having none of it. He led a delegation of American athletes across the Athletes Village to meet with their Soviet counterparts.

“I was accused of being too friendly with the Soviets,” Richards said. “I’m sure it was contrary to what Josef Stalin wanted. You see, the athletes respected each other when they got the chance to talk. There’s no question sports can break down barriers. Look at the pingpong team that went to what was then called Red China. Look at the influence of the gymnasts. Every little girl in this country wanted to be Olga Korbut or Nadia Comaneci. There is something bigger in sports than borders or medal races.”

“What became obvious,” said Richards, “is that they didn’t like the system. The Soviet athletes told us that in broken Spanish and in English and in Russian. They had no freedom. They lived in fear. Stalin’s technique was to call you in and say that if you confessed to being a traitor, he would only kill you and not your family too. How can a system like that ever last?”

Richards encouraged the Russian jumpers by shouting “Harosho!” (“good”) on their clearances, and they in turn cheered “Bootiful!” when he sailed over a bar. After he won in Helsinki, two Soviet pole-vaulters ran over to embrace him. The subsequent photograph became a world symbol of idealism in sports.

“I sent the first fiberglass poles to the Russians,” he said. “It was before the first USA-Russia dual track meet in 19[58], because they couldn’t get any good ones. Boy, did that ever boomerang on the USA!”

Richards was closely identified with the better aspects of sports: clean competition and respect in spite of political ideologies. “It was what I believed,” Richards said. “If you study the Olympic ideology in ancient times, it was beautiful. They laid down their arms and held a peaceful competition. It was highly religious, and much of it was predicated on strength. Hercules was the patron god.”

Richards is the patriarch of pole-vaulting’s highest flying family. His son Brandon held the national high school record for thirteen years. “We still hold the family record,” he said of the various jumping Richardses. “I think we’re up there around 90 feet cumulative in highest bars cleared, and I have a couple of grandkids who are going to be good too.”

Ironically, Richards wants to stand athwart the path of progress as far as the fiberglass pole goes and cry: “Halt!” He worries that with poles costing $500 each and pits costing over $10,000 schools are no longer going to be able to afford the sport.

“Besides the cost effectiveness, people are dying in the sport,” Richards said. “I really think they’re going to have to go back to the steel pole. I used a $30 stiff pole and went to two Olympics with it.”

In 1984 Richards ran for president on the ultra–right wing Populist Party ticket. When he realized a cabal of neo-Nazis and former Ku Klux Klan members ran the party, he virtually stopped campaigning out of embarrassment.

After his Olympic success, Richards became a spokesman for Wheaties. He was the first to appear on a box. Getting your picture on a Wheaties box today is the ultimate expression of Americana, keying into heartland values, connoting amber waves of grain and clean-cut, God-fearing manliness. The judging controversy in Olympic gymnastics, thought eventual winner Paul Hamm of the United States, might have hurt him most of all by costing him a Wheaties box appearance.

“Sure, I still eat them,” said Richards, now living on a ranch in Gordon, Texas, 50 miles west of Fort Worth. “A bowl of Wheaties every day and about 10,000 hours of hard work can take you anywhere you want to go in life.”

TARZAN

It happened in Istanbul, but it could have been almost any place where Don Bragg pole-vaulted—just another tale in the 1,001 tales of his life. In 1958, while Bragg was enjoying an evening on the town in Islamic Istanbul during a Eurasian tour, a rich sheik and his entourage cut in on Bragg and a woman with whom he was dancing. Understandably miffed and not bound by the finer points of diplomatic protocol, Bragg and his buddies bull-rushed the Turks and scattered them like tenpins. They then hailed a cab, returned to their hotel, and pushed heavy furniture against the door to keep out the sheik’s scimitar-wielding henchmen.

In A Chance to Dare, Bragg wrote that he apologized to the coach of the American team and said he didn’t know why he kept getting in trouble. “Hell, son,” the coach said, patting him on the shoulder. “You’re crazy. That’s all.”

The coach provided an explanation, but further evidence came from the times Bragg dove off bridges, leaped out of a powerboat, nearly stepped on a deadly black mamba snake, almost swam into the maw of a turbine, plummeted from the rafters into a swimming pool, tried to turn himself into a charcoal briquette when his pole hit a power line, arm-wrestled and beat the strongest man in Iraq, became a prototype for the Harlem Globetrotters and the Peace Corps, and otherwise cut an outrageous swath through the stuffy world of amateur track and field in the 1950s. Much of this Bragg did while bellowing like Tarzan, the make-believe noble primitive whom he idolized. Bragg never got to play Tarzan on the silver screen, but he spent his boyhood looping tree limbs with ropes, and he made his life an audition for the role. The sense of purity and freedom he felt when swinging on his “vines” tapped an atavistic memory of a time when trees were the greenhouse of man. He could only recapture the feeling with the rare air of a soaring vault.

His training ground was similar to that of Warmerdam. Bragg grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in the so-called Cabbage Patch area of Penns Grove, New Jersey. They grew cabbages in the fields, and it always smelled like St. Patrick’s Day. Like Mack, he was a pole-vaulter who feared heights. Mack is so technically efficient, his numbers so precise, his approach so methodical that he seems to fill the time with busy work and the click of abacus beads. But really, it was just the same as Bragg. Both jumped as a way of plunging into what they were afraid of and mastering it.

“I still have a fear of heights,” Bragg said. “I can’t stand on a third-story hotel balcony without getting dizzy, without experiencing vertigo like you wouldn’t believe. It has to do with the inner ear. But I dived off cliffs and off bridges anyway. It was a way of conquering fear. I was going to do it. They were not going to scare my ass. And I always had a little problem with authority figures.”

“I can’t do what?” Bragg added, mimicking a conversation with his old college coach, James “Jumbo” Elliott of Villanova. “And all of a sudden I’m on a rafter above the pool at Villanova, and I’m jumping in.”

He saw height as an expression of freedom from knowing his place, from the suffocation of society’s rules. When he would go shooting untrammeled across the sky, he was at last high above the stunted little men who ran sports and grubbed at their work in the dark. Bragg seldom hid his scorn for autocratic U.S. Olympic Committee (and later IOC) head Avery Brundage. In his mind, Olympics officials were the types of people that preferred hotels Lord Greystoke would have patronized. The jocks got ape-man accommodations.

The Tarzan fixation that dated to the moment he saw Weissmuller play the part when he was eight years old helped Bragg develop his upper body as he swung on ropes throughout his childhood. Pole-vaulters must have a high strength-to-weight ratio because, obviously, a larger man has more to lift. Bragg was one of the heavier vaulters, at nearly 200 pounds. He sometimes would “kink” the poles, his weight putting a crimp in the metal. He broke twenty-seven poles that way.

“Everything changed with fiberglass,” Bragg said. “It’s much more precise now. If your steps are off even just a little bit, it affects your takeoff, and the whole vault is in trouble. Timing is much more critical. Strength was a bigger part of it in my day.”

He vaulted like Tarzan penduluming through the jungle. If he could have thumped his chest and still handled the pole, he would have. He tore his body up. He experienced what is called “shoulder shock.” The joints took the jolt of the plant of the steel pole. Fiberglass would transfer some of this force to the pole. He had the requisite guts too. Bragg has had two spinal operations because of the battering he took falling into sand-filled landing pits. And despite all that, he loved it so.

“Who else but a crazy man is going to put himself through all that, flying around up there at the mercy of a skinny pole?” Bragg said.

In Bragg’s era, the pole vault almost stood alone. “Oh, it was a premier event,” said Bragg. “There was the mile, the 100, depending on the quality of the sprinters, and the pole vault.” Today, track and field as a whole has declined in popularity in the United States, but the pole vault’s popularity within the sport is essentially unchanged since Bragg’s day.

A bent pole took Bragg all the way from Penns Grove to the glittering capitals of Europe and the veils and sultanates of the Middle East.

“I jumped all over Europe,” he said. “I even jumped in Baghdad. Baghdad! What’s happening there now must be because of all the goodwill I created.”

“I jumped 14–6,” Bragg added. “Then I stopped because I was falling into hard-packed sand. The coach comes over and says nobody ever jumped 15 feet in Iraq. I said, ‘Nobody’s going to either.’ I went over and threw the shot then arm-wrestled their champion. Arm-wrestling is very big in Iraq. I didn’t exactly feel the love when I beat him.”

Bragg struck up friendships with Soviet athletes, particularly pole-vaulter Vladimir Bulatov and long-jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesian. His passport was stamped in all the languages of Babel. “We went all over the world. In many ways, we were the first Harlem Globetrotters,” he said. “Sometimes, when we got back, we were debriefed by the government. They saw the good we could do with ordinary citizens, and that led eventually to the Peace Corps.”

Often, he chased Richards around the world. If anything emphasizes the difference between them, it might be their separate visits to Sri Lanka, the former Ceylon.

“Oh, it was a grand time,” said Richards. “I got carried off on the shoulders of the people. Everybody was singing ‘Home on the Range.’ The consulate said nothing had affected the people there like that. I asked them, ‘Weren’t you trying to make friends with these people or what?’”

“Wherever I went, Bob Richards had the record,” said Bragg. “The conditions in Sri Lanka were very inferior, the pits, the runway, but that was usual. I cleared 14–4 [4.37], and I figure I’ve got to break Richards’ record of 14–6, so we set the bar at 14–7 [4.45].”

In those days, it was a miss if the pole passed under the bar, even if the jumper cleared. Josh Culbreath, one of Bragg’s friends, stood near the standards ready to catch the pole.

“I’m on the runway,” continued Bragg, “and all of a sudden over the rim of the stadium come these huge flying bats. They were fruit bats or some damn thing. Everybody takes cover and, zoom, they fly by. I get up to try again, and here comes another squadron of them on another strafing run. They’re swooping down, so I start running for it. Josh has already taken cover, and he’s yelling, ‘Get ’em, Tarzan! Tarzan’s not afraid of anything!’”

Carting poles around is a pole-vaulter’s occupational hazard. Every man who ever competed in the event has stories of airlines misplacing poles, refusing to take poles, shipping poles by mistake to Sri Lanka. But Bragg could have been killed in Philadelphia when his pole touched a power line while he was trying to slither, angle, and wedge it into a trolley at the 30th Street Station. A man who gets a second chance at life after such a moment often feels he has been saved for a higher purpose. Bragg, however, already felt he had been born and reborn through countless cycles of life and death.

At Rome, when he won the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics, he felt he had been in the Coliseum in a previous life and that he had suffered terribly before dying as a gladiator. He could put himself in a trance-like state then go back to the blood and the dust, his limbs shaking, his body thumping on the bed.

“I wrote a poem called ‘Being,’” he said.

The entity, the representation of incandescence

It comes to me in its primordial essence.

The only necessity to change is the scenery.

I continue to pole ride with the spirits of the past.

“Do I believe in reincarnation?” he continued. After a long pause, Bragg said: “Unquestionably.” He won the gold medal, he felt, because he was a warrior come back to the arena he knew, because he had a “home-field advantage.”

“If any of those guys who went to Greece had any greater spiritual experience than I did in Rome, then they’re God,” said Bragg.

He thought he could live forever in the tree house, jumping in the dappled light, daring the green roof of the world, jumping until the poles gave out. But he couldn’t, of course. He has been plagued by health and financial problems in his old age. He lost many of the mementos of his career in a fire. He developed gout (a not-unheard-of problem for athletes who subsisted on a high-protein diet for years), suffered two heart attacks, and overcame alcoholism. After all that, Bragg often wonders why he was spared electrocution.

“I figure God said, ‘I’m going to keep him alive until his ass gets over that bar, then I’m going to throw all kinds of shit and lightning bolts at him and see how he can dance,’” Bragg said.

By the 1960 Olympics, he was drawing a private’s pay in the U.S. Army. In a special pre-Olympics edition of the game show What’s My Line? Bragg was scheduled to appear, along with the American track and field Olympic coach, hammer thrower Albert Hall, and Olympic legend Jesse Owens as the mystery guest. But the show ran out of time, and Bragg was merely introduced at the end with an underline identifying him as an Army private. He did not get to play a game.

After his medal ceremony, Bragg broke loose with a Tarzan yell. The people who ran the International Olympic Committee were not amused.

The old gladiator also never got to play Tarzan in the movies. A lawsuit stopped the filming of Bragg’s movie Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar in 1964, and a fire later destroyed the prints. Perhaps, though, he lived the part in life’s jungles.

Although he bears the scars of an I-dare-you life, he can still bust that defiant tremolo he practiced from the treetops. Asked if he can still do a Tarzan yell, he said from his home in Clayton, California: “Better hold the phone away from your ear.” The scream that followed would have won Jane and Cheetah’s hearts forever.

“Small children are running outside their houses,” Bragg said upon finishing, “and all the dogs in the neighborhood are howling.”

SUPERSTAR

Bob Seagren took magic carpet rides. Well, sort of. He was eleven years old, fooling around with his older brother back in Pomona, California, and the bamboo poles around which department stores wrapped rugs became for him both a method of conveyance and, later, a career choice.

“The first couple of years, I never used it for height. It was a mode of transportation,” he said. “We’d move from the roof of one garage to another, see who could go the furthest without touching the ground and things like that. I missed a bunch of times, but I never got hurt seriously.”

He would go skylarking around the whole neighborhood, tree to roof, roof to roof, tree to tree, jumping and vaulting until he seemed almost arboreal in nature.

“Even though we got around the block pretty good, I literally got clotheslined once,” said Seagren. “I was trying to jump over the clothesline my mother hung the wash on and caught the wire on my neck. It tore all the skin off. I had trouble swallowing for a few days.”

Seagren came from the daredevil tradition of pole-vaulting, but he seemed a breed apart from earnest Midwesterners like Richards or hardscrabble guys from Jersey like Bragg. He went to the University of Southern California, where celebrated coach Vern Wolfe made him part of a stable of Trojan Olympians. Wolfe coached such Olympic gold medalists as Dallas Long in the shot put, Donald Quarrie in the 200 meters, Rex Cawley in the 400 hurdles, Randy Williams in the long jump, and Seagren, the 1968 Olympic pole vault champion. He also coached O.J. Simpson, who ran on a USC team that still holds the world record for the no-longer-performed 440-yard relay.

“I resented Seagren at first,” said Bragg. “I was pissed off at the fiberglass pole. It took me twelve years to get the world record on the steel pole, and then along comes fiberglass, and these guys fresh out of college, and it becomes gymnastics moves, not strength. The records just went crazy.”

A key to Seagren’s success was that Wolfe was one of the earliest proponents of strength training. Even in the 1950s at North Phoenix High School in Arizona, Wolfe was urging his athletes to lift weights. He took empty cans, filled them with cement, connected them with rods, and thus created instant barbells. Many athletes in that era, aside from bodybuilders and weightlifters, eschewed lifting, thinking it would make them too muscle-bound.

While weights developed the strength Seagren needed, the requisite courage he already had from his aerial transits of the old neighborhood. “It never entered my mind that it was dangerous, although the fiberglass poles were pretty new then,” he said. “I must have had twenty or thirty of them break. I was never hurt, although the fragments of the pole hurt people standing around me.”

Every pole-vaulter faces trials. Seagren just happened to face two in one Olympic season. It was the beginning of his estrangement from the officials who ran amateur track and field.

“They said the winner of the Trials was assured of a spot for Mexico City in 1968 and that second and third would be picked after that in a meet at Lake Tahoe,” recalled Seagren, the winner of the first Trials. “Then, they changed their minds and said the whole team would be picked at Tahoe. In between, I got hurt. They had some tune-up meets at Lake Tahoe, and I went up there the Saturday before the big meet and hurt my back warming up.”

Seagren had pinched a nerve. He would lie flat on his back in a hospital bed that had been stiffened by a board placed under the thin mattress. He took Demerol to dull the pain every two hours. He was back in the shantytown of trailers in which the athletes were housed by the middle of the next week. He won the second Trials, setting a world record of 17–9.

But the game had changed. Seagren’s most excellent adventures and his most strident controversies were overshadowed by political developments—in 1968, the Tommie Smith/John Carlos black-gloved protest of racial injustice in America, in 1972, the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes.

Seagren was only twenty-one when he won the gold medal at 17–8½ (5.40), when a three-way tie came down to fewest misses. In Mexico City, he was a member of perhaps the greatest track team ever assembled with Lee Evans in the 400, Bob Beamon in the long jump, Jimmy Hines in the 100, and Smith in the 200 all setting formidable records there, while Dick Fosbury revolutionized the technique of the high jump with the international debut of the “Fosbury Flop.”

But as the pole vault final neared its conclusion, Smith, the winner of the 200, and Carlos, the bronze medalist, staged their medal ceremony protest during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Ten days before the Olympics began, on October 2, 1968, a crowd of 5,000 students had gathered in Mexico City’s Plaza of the Three Cultures to protest the Mexican government’s vast expenditures on fun and games in an impoverished nation. Soldiers and police shot and killed an estimated 200 of them. In June of 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. In April of the same year, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. In that time and in that place, the protest Smith and Carlos made against America’s institutionalized racism and, by implication, the misplaced priorities of waging a war in Vietnam amid such inequities at home was heard ’round the world.

It created a sensation to which Seagren, wrapped in his cocoon of concentration, was almost immune.

“All I knew was we were jumping for a world record [of 17–10½, or 5.45],” Seagren said. “The protest never entered my mind. I had great tunnel vision. Exterior things went away. You really had to have blinders on, because the focus is so intense, and it has to remain so intense for so long.”

“We had started warming up at noon,” he added. “Warm-ups were a big deal. They were a way to intimidate people. You wanted to nail practice jumps and let them know, ‘You’re all jumping to beat me.’ I didn’t take my first jump until 3:30 and didn’t jump again until 5. The whole thing lasted seven and a half hours.”

Seagren never had a problem with the protesters: “A lot of people misunderstood what they did. They meant no disrespect to the national anthem. I knew what inequities the black athletes faced back at home. They were under tremendous pressure to boycott, but most of them thought it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and they had to go.”

Four years later at Munich, embittered by the controversy that unseated him as pole vault champion (ending the Americans’ century-long dominance of the event) and sickened by the ghastly terrorist massacre of the Israeli national team, he wondered if the Olympics themselves would continue.

“It made you think,” Seagren said. “I wondered if Munich was the end of the Olympic movement. This was before 1984 [when the Los Angeles Olympics turned a profit], and every city that held them lost so much money. They had gotten so huge, they were almost impossible to police. I really thought this might be the last Olympics.”

His own experience in the pole vault assured him that it was his final Olympics. Seagren lost because the governing bodies of track and field then had the same absolute control of athletes as medieval barons had over their serfs. “Citius, altius, fortius” is the Olympic motto. “Faster, higher, stronger—but only if we say so,” should have been the motto.

The new fiberglass Cata-Pole, used by Seagren and all the top Americans, was ruled illegal on the eve of the competition despite the fact that the rules governing the pole vault said the implements can be made out of anything. The excuse was that the poles were not available to the Eastern Bloc athletes for twelve months before the Olympics. No such requirement existed in the rule book. It was a Luddite impulse, an attempt to reverse the course of technology, to smash the spinning jennies and return to the days of the distaff and spindle. At the 1972 Olympics, after the record book revolution that had been wrought by fiberglass poles in 1964 and 1968, reactionaries disciplined the sport. But they couldn’t tame the sky for long.

“They made up the rules as they went along,” said Seagren. “That was where I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Adriaan Paulen.”

A Norwegian official of the IAAF and the organization’s future president, Paulen was what Alabama governor George C. Wallace’s “pointy-headed bureaucrats” wanted to be when they grew up—a pig-headed ignoramus with no scruples about fair play at all, unless they were provided for in Addendum 5, Paragraph 4, Clause 3, Appendix B to the actuarial tables.

“He really didn’t have any criteria for what constituted a legal pole,” said Seagren, “so he shot from the hip. Paulen and a West German coach were taking the butt plugs out of my poles and weighing them on a very unsophisticated bathroom scale.”

Paulen and his aides discovered that some of the Cata-Poles were almost fifty grams lighter than the old-style poles, all of which were within ten grams of each other in weight. Fifty grams is less than two ounces, ten grams is less than a half-ounce. In essence, Paulen was debating the weight of gossamer vs. the heft of cotton candy. He was making war on people who broke the wrong end of the egg. He was as nearly a complete putz you would find anywhere else this side of the International Olympic Committee.

“I said if a pole is designed for a 180-pound man at 16 feet, 6 inches in length, that’s what it weighs,” Seagren said. “I said if the pole weighs six pounds, did he really think a matter of a couple of ounces made any difference? I said did he really think anyone could tell?”

According to Seagren, Paulen said: “One more word, and I’m throwing you out for unsportsmanlike conduct.”

Seagren vaulted with an unfamiliar pole and finished second at 17–8½ behind East Germany’s Wolfgang Nordwig at 18–0½ (5.50). Nordwig had struggled with the Cata-Poles, which might explain why East Germany filed the first protest against their use. Pole-vaulters seldom fare well on borrowed poles when their own are lost, so Seagren’s silver medal was a tribute to his competitiveness and adaptability.

Afterward, Seagren snarled at Paulen, “You gave me this pole, now I’m returning it.” Then, Seagren—Wham, with the right hand!—nearly gutted the official when he threw the pole at him.

“If I had shoved it where I wanted to, I’d still be in a German jail,” said Seagren.

Fed up with the “shamateurism” of the day, he turned pro with the International Track Association, a circuit that lasted four years and featured world record-holders Jim Ryun (mile) and Randy Matson (shot put) in addition to Seagren.

At the mercy of their cumbersome implements, burdened on trips to meets with more baggage than anyone since Dorian Gray, pole-vaulters could have remained as they were before Seagren—a different breed admired for their aspirations to flight yet underappreciated for their ability as athletes in their event. Then came the original Superstars in 1973, a made-for-television sports event that captivated fans, made Seagren $39,700 richer as its first winner, and legitimized pole-vaulters as all-around athletes. ABC-Television, which had lost the contract to televise the NBA to NBC, seized on the concept as a drowning man might a lifeline. Its executives saw the show as programming to fill the gaps the loss of hoops had created in the young, male, beer-drinking, car-buying demographic marketing sector all networks targeted.

On the show, every athlete was a star in his own sport: Joe Frazier, boxing; Johnny Unitas, football; Johnny Bench, baseball; Elvin Hayes, basketball; Rod Laver, tennis; Rod Gilbert, hockey; Jean-Claude Killy, skiing; Peter Revson, auto racing, as well as the heir to the Revlon cosmetics empire; Jim Stefanich, bowling; and Seagren, a late addition.

“First, [jockey] Bill Shoemaker was going to be in it, but he broke his ankle in a race,” said Seagren. “I called and was told they had other alternates lined up. They said they had bigger names, and they weren’t interested in me. Then [golfer] Gary Player came down with appendicitis, and I was in.”

Bench had had lung surgery to remove a benign tumor only months before the filming. Unitas was near the end of his career. The stars could not compete in their own sport. Seagren won the baseball hitting contest, the half-mile run, and the bike race on the last day to hold off runner-up Killy. Thanks to his USC coach’s insistence on weight training, Seagren outlifted Frazier, who was approximately thirty pounds heavier but had never hoisted anything but his dukes.

Competitively, the Superstars featured Frazier going through the water like an anchor in swimming. “I really thought Howard Cosell was going to jump in and rescue him,” said Seagren of the ABC broadcaster. “Frazier had never swum, and when I asked him why on earth he would choose swimming for one of his events, he said, ‘I watched the others.’”

Frazier’s view was that the athletes were delivering combinations worthy of the squared circle to the pool. “He was throwing lefts and rights at the water, but he wasn’t going anywhere,” said Seagren, laughing. “He was sinking like a rock.”

To this day, Seagren, who runs a company that stages road races for runners and lives in Long Beach, California, gets recognized more for Superstars than anything else. After Superstars came a long parade of imitators, from Battle of the Network Stars up to the Lingerie Bowl. The publicity that came with the Superstars victory, along with his matinee idol looks, made acting a natural choice for Seagren’s second career. He did several episodes of Love Boat and appeared on Fantasy Island, Emergency, and Adam 12. His most remembered role was as Dennis Phillips, a gay quarterback on the brilliant parody of afternoon television shows, Soap.

“I had always played jocks or coaches,” Seagren said. “My agent told me I was playing a football player, and my thought was, ‘Oh, great.’ Then he told me he was gay, and my thought was, ‘Uh-oh.’ It was a different era, but I thought, ‘Why not? It might make people think.’”

After Soap, Seagren toiled on through seven failed pilots, in most of which he was required to remove his shirt and serve as eye candy for the female audience.

“Stunt Seven was one of them,” he said “We were stunt men who solved problems for world governments illegally. If something [covert] needed to be done, they called us. Morgan Brittany and Christopher Lloyd were in the pilot too. We had to rescue Elke Sommers, who played a starlet who had been kidnapped and held for ransom.”

The pilot dearest to Seagren’s heart was a special, hour-long episode of Charlie’s Angels that was to have been the pilot for a spin-off series to be called Toni’s Boys. “Barbara Stanwyck was to play the Bosley role from Charlie’s Angels. We were three male angels,” he said. It got great ratings when it aired as a Charlie’s Angels episode. As a premise, it seemed to have “TiVo me” written all over it.

“I thought it was a can’t-miss,” said Seagren, a vaulting Valentino, but only a fallen “angel.”