The M&D Track Club

Inching up “The Hill” to his apartment near the University of Tennessee campus, Mack would point the nose of his 1983 Dodge Omni skyward, grind the gears, and put the pedal to the metal. On good days, a lurch of barely detectible motion would follow, while Mack hunkered down behind the wheel as if to cut wind resistance.

Knoxville, Tennessee, is, among other things, home to the 27,000-student University of Tennessee; site of the last successful World’s Fair held in the United States in 1982; the place where director Quentin Tarantino and MTV stuntman Johnny Knoxville were born; the town where Hulk Hogan wrestled when he was known as Sterling Golden; the location of the jail from which Kid Curry, a member of Butch Cassidy’s gang, escaped in 1901; and the city where the soft drink Mountain Dew was developed in the 1940s by Hartman Beverages.

During Tim Mack’s student days there, Knoxville—with its elevation of 936 feet and the hazy Smoky Mountains flanking it—was as big a problem to Mack’s wheezing car as a high bar was to the man behind the wheel. “The Hill,” the rising bank on the north shore of the Tennessee River, was the site of the small original campus. Mack’s apartment perched atop the neighborhood known as Cedar Bluff. The road to the apartment ran uphill at such a drastic angle it ought to have had a ski lift alongside it.

Coach Jim Bemiller sold the car to Mack for $200 after Tim graduated from the University of Tennessee. 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, “but I knew Tim didn’t have any money. That’s why I sold it cheap.”

“Tim would be sitting so low,” observed Russ Johnson, Mack’s roommate for five years, “because the seats were about eight inches off the ground.”

It stayed low to the ground, apparently, because it was afraid of heights. “Dude, it wouldn’t go uphill,” Johnson said. “Our other roommate, Andy Knight, had a Dodge Cherokee. Tim’s car would only make it up the hill if he had about a 30-mile-per-hour running start. Andy would be in front of us. About halfway up the hill, he would stop, and Tim would have to go back down and try again.”

Only once did Mack foil Knight. The Omni was capable of only a move or two on a hill before the engine would meekly agree to surrender terms. “I knew he was going to stop,” Mack said, “so I said, ‘Screw it.’ I veered over the curb. I was half on the grass and half on the street, and I cut in front of him. That was one of the better days. It felt great.”

Johnson, Knight, and Mack were all young pole-vaulters in the mid-1990s. In Tim’s car, they fervently hoped someday to be old pole-vaulters.

“We would be creeping up ‘The Hill’ so slowly, it was like we were checking people’s houses out, like we were stalkers,” said Johnson.

“Tim, we’ve got to go faster than this,” Johnson would plead.

“I’ve got it floored,” Mack would reply.

For Mack, being a graduate student was even tougher than being a little-known pole-vaulter on a one-quarter scholarship. He is the only one of the Macks’ five children to graduate from a four-year college. “His scholarship included books but not tuition, and it was high because it was out of state,” his mother said.

In 1997, the time of the “Daily Gradual Ascent of The Hill,” Mack was working at a packing company. He loaded tea bags, taking little boxes of them off a conveyor belt, putting them in a bigger box, and strapping it tight with tape.

“I hated the smell of that place,” he said. “I stood in one place, and I’d work from 4 in the afternoon till 3 in the morning. I was in grad school and still trying to vault. I wondered that it had come to this. I wondered if I was capable of supporting myself to where I could only pole-vault. That was my big dream. I thought about it all the time. Was pole-vaulting all a pipedream?”

Many pole-vaulters give up the sport after their college days. There is no support system around them. Coaching is no longer part of the program, because they no longer represent the university. “When you think about it,” said Joe Whitney, the University of Tennessee’s sports psychologist, “Tim had no logical reason to still be in the game. He was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, getting up at 5 in the morning to work out, making ends meet with jobs other people didn’t want to do.”

“One reason I never had a girlfriend [until Grace Upshaw] is I didn’t have the means,” Mack said. “I was barely able to take care of myself. There was no one serious in my life before Grace. After I started to jump well enough to get the means, I became more open to things.”

There was no spare time for a social life. What Mack calls the best day in the Dodge Omni was also the last day in the rattletrap. “I was going to work to pack more teabags,” Mack said. “It was icy, and someone cut in front of me going down the hill. I was going real slow, but I clipped the front end of his car. Then, when I tried to steer back, I turned into a telephone pole. I was going slow enough that I had time to brace myself, so I wasn’t hurt.”

Mack got out of the car and circled it, surveying the damage. Then he jubilantly pumped his fist. “I totaled that bastard! I’m saved!” he cried. “I don’t have to go to work, and I’ll never have to drive that damn car again!”

Long before Bemiller sold Mack the barely rolling Omni, he took a special interest in him. They would come to have a deeper relationship than the normal coach/athlete association.

“I was lucky. I had good friends looking after me,” Mack said.

It wasn’t all luck. Some of it, his friends would say, was his just dessert.

Russ Johnson jumped 18–6 as a Vol, second all-time to the magnificently talented Lawrence Johnson. Russ Johnson only came to the University of Tennessee because he saw Mack at the U.S. Nationals the night after he had jumped at a high school meet at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome.

“I went because I had never seen anybody jump 16 feet,” Russ Johnson said. “I was 5–10, 140 pounds, and I was told I had to be 6–2, 185 to get a scholarship. Actually, I wound up with an academic scholarship to Tennessee. There were two college guys in the Nationals, and Tim was one of them. He was really skinny then, 165 pounds, tops. He looked like a skeleton compared to now. I think he no-heighted that night. I remember he was throwing his poles around and wasn’t happy.”

Russ Johnson’s father said: “If that guy can make it to college vaulting, there’s no excuse if you don’t too.”

On his visit to the Knoxville campus, Russ sat at the top of the bleachers in awe of the three 18-foot jumpers, who kept going off into the wild blue yonder. “The first person I saw that day was Tim Mack,” Russ said. “I was a freshman, and Tim was a graduate assistant coach. He was the only one who walked up to the top of the steps and talked to me. He was interested in me, even though he didn’t know me. We talked a lot about my goals. ‘You need to come here,’ he told me.”

Both Russ Johnson and Mack clicked with “B,” Bemiller’s nickname. “‘B’ instills confidence and doesn’t get rattled,” Russ Johnson said. “He’s a cool customer who keeps it simple. He doesn’t want you to focus on every part of the jump, just the big motor mechanics.”

Mack also struck up a lasting friendship with Tim O’Hare. “The reason I’m still living in Tennessee and became anything in pole vaulting was Tim Mack,” O’Hare said. “My freshman year, the track coach, Bill Webb, told me things weren’t working out. I was a walk-on, and he said I wasn’t going to make the team. I thought I was out of there. I wanted to jump, so I was going to have to go to a different school. My chances to improve were limited, because I couldn’t jump with the team.”

“Stick around,” Mack said. “I’ll help you.”

For close to an hour either before Mack’s practice or after, he would coach O’Hare. “The whole year I jumped by myself with Tim coaching me. The next year, I made the team, and I jumped four years at Tennessee,” O’Hare said.

Years later, Mack would be Tim O’Hare’s best man. In 2004 O’Hare would pay his own way to Athens to signal wind direction to Mack at the Olympics.

After Mack had won in Athens, he didn’t change. He didn’t think service to others was beneath him. When he returned to Cleveland to celebrate Christmas after the Olympics, a reporter scheduled an interview with him at Baldwin-Wallace College, where Mack would train when home. Mack said to get there late, because he was going to spend the first hour studying the technique of an Ohio high school female pole-vaulter who had e-mailed him asking for help. The voluntary coaching was canceled by a record snowstorm, but the altruistic impulse behind it was still strong.

“Tim and I bonded,” Russ Johnson said. “We were similar size, similar backgrounds, similar personalities. We were more analytical than the daredevil stereotype.”

“For a long time,” he added, “Tim was just scraping by. The first time I went to his apartment, he had four shirts in his closet. I said: ‘Dude, you have got to go to a store and get some shirts.’ But Tim didn’t care. He had a very spartan lifestyle. For example, he cuts his own hair with clippers. Do you know anybody who cuts his own hair unless it’s with one of those buzz things?”

“I still cut my own hair,” Mack said. “I made a few bucks over the years cutting guys’ hair. It’s been twelve years since I paid to have my hair cut.”

He lived on all the “helpers”—tuna, hamburger, chicken. Also on spaghetti and Ramen noodles. When Burger King had 99-cent Whopper specials, Mack would be the first in line. “You can get pretty full on $2 then,” he said.

Mack also was a steady customer at Gus’s Good Times Deli on “The Strip,” a line of fast-food restaurants and bars adjacent to campus. Originally owned by a Greek, Gus Captain, Gus’s would deliver steamed sandwiches on campus until 4 A.M. Today, an autographed picture of Mack screaming in exultation after clearing the bar on his gold medal jump in Athens hangs on the wall there. It joins those of many other mostly male Vol athletes, among them the NFL’s Peyton Manning and Willie Gault, and Major League Baseball’s Todd Helton, who counted on Gus to steer them safely through the shoals of the hungry wee hours to the happy harbors of cholesterol and saturated fat.

The friendships Mack made then in the years of struggle would be instrumental to him in 2004, the shining season of triumph. It was an e-mail from Russ Johnson to Mack—from one studious jumper who had viewed hours and hours of vaulting videotape in the apartment to another studious jumper who had sat bleary-eyed in front of the VCR—that inspired the notebook in which Mack wrote the performance formula for the gold medal.

“Frankly, it is a good thing Tim is analytical, that he is not the daredevil type,” said Tim O’Hare. “I’m glad he’s not a wild guy. If he did unusual things, he’d get hurt. Tim twisted his ankle more than anyone I ever knew, and he was always so dramatic about it. If he was a real daredevil, he wouldn’t be around.”

We think of Olympians, particularly gold medal winners in a spectacular event like the pole vault, as men of elegance and casual grace under pressure. The stunts of the would-be sky kings only reinforce the image. Just as at Malone College, Mack endured a hazing ritual at the University of Tennessee. This time it was diving off the side of an abandoned quarry into the water far below. Mack tied a towel around his neck and went howling down with the terrycloth billowing behind him like Superman’s cape when the Man of Steel was on the hunt for Lex Luthor.

“I didn’t like doing it,” Mack said, “but it taught me that you can ignore your fears. It taught me to keep my focus on the things I needed to do, on the process, not on the event as a whole.”

But who knew Superman was a klutz?

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.

Richmond Flowers, a world-ranked hurdler for three years in the late 1960s, probably put the University of Tennessee on the map as a track and field power. Johnson, the most prominent black pole-vaulter ever, reflected how the program had become a star incubator since Flowers.

“Lawrence wasn’t a great black pole-vaulter. He was a great pole-vaulter in general,” Mack said. “He did some amazing things. He must have had unbelievable strength in his tendons.”

Johnson, known as “LoJo” as a play on Florence Griffith Joyner’s “FloJo” nickname, began as a high school hurdler. LoJo converted to pole-vaulting because the state of Virginia’s best hurdler already went to the same high school in Great Ridge. With the Vols, he might have been the best track and field athlete since Flowers. “If anybody saw us standing next to each other years ago, and somebody said, ‘Four years from now, ten years from now, one of these guys is going to be the Olympic gold medalist, ten out of ten people would pick Lawrence,” Mack said.

Intimidating on sheer athletic ability, Johnson also brought an arrogance to the sport that made the pole he would prop on his shoulder seem indistinguishable from a chip. “He was always very confident,” said Mack. “We started out a little rough in our relationship, because he could be a little loud. But he was just supremely confident. I wish I could be that confident in myself.”

It was, Mack thought, a difference in the way they approached life. Mack was a master of containment. Pole-vaulting was a hard, all-consuming endeavor with him. He could spare nothing for frills. Johnson was an R&B artist who wrote songs for the Knoxville band Soja. He sang backup with other celebrity jocks for Bryan Adams at concerts. He was prodigiously talented, brimming over with possibilities. He sometimes competed while wearing sunglasses.

“Lawrence was always very open, and I’m closed,” Mack said. “He would always get the crowd involved in it. He would get really animated after a make, although not to Toby Stevenson’s extreme. He did things that just freaked everybody out, then he’d look at me and say, ‘Don’t take it personally.’ Being around Lawrence prepared me for how it was going to be out there.”

Johnson won the 1993 SEC decathlon. As a senior, he scored points for the Vols in the SEC hurdles. He won the U.S. Olympic Trials twice in the pole vault and won the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships. He was second in the 1997 World Indoor Championships. He won the same event in 2001. He was the silver medalist at the 2000 Olympics. He belonged in the sky the way rockets did on patriotic national holidays. He talked of clearing 21 feet (6.40) 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.

Mack points to Johnson’s practice regime in gymnastics class as an example of LoJo’s freakish athletic prowess. “Lawrence would do back-flips on a trampoline for thirty minutes. Bounce, bounce, flip. Bounce, bounce, flip. We stopped timing him by the number of repetitions. We just went by time,” Mack said.

The norm for everyone else in the class?

“Maybe five reps in a row,” Mack said.

“Lawrence was a key recruit for us,” Bemiller said. “He was a high school phenom. He jumped 17 feet in high school. He jumped 18–8¼ [5.70] when he was nineteen years old, same as Bubka. When he was a senior in college, he jumped 19–7½ [5.98], which was the American record at the time.”

The kind of ability Johnson had made him a factor in any meet he entered. Even when he was injured, there was always the chance he could put it together. And Lawrence Johnson was injured so often he kept orthopedists happy for years. In 1994 he suffered a horrific fall, missing the pit and tearing the muscles and tendons off his left foot when he landed. In 1998, while filming an Adidas commercial, he suffered a severe sprain of his ankle. In 2001 he won a meet at Princeton after bouncing out of the pit and landing on his hip on a practice jump. That season, he won the U.S. Outdoor while breaking his right fibula. In 2002 he suffered another ankle sprain and had rotator cuff surgery.

Injuries are a part of the sport. The pole vault takes a ferocious toll on the human body. By the 2004 season, the pole vault would spit LoJo out. It is a cruel event, cannibalizing its young. The Lost Boys can soar, but a career without injury is their never-never land. “Staying healthy is a big part of success in the event,” said Bemiller.

Despite their differences, Bemiller liked the Mack/Johnson pairing, thinking that their opposed personalities created a strong competitive unit. “Throughout his college career, Tim was overshadowed by Lawrence. Lawrence was an NCAA champ and a conference champ in the best track and field conference in the country. For a while, Tim tied the Tennessee record, but he was always in Lawrence’s shadow. Lawrence was the Alan Webb of track and field in his day, the next golden boy,” Bemiller said, referring to the USA’s 1,500-meter hopeful Webb, who broke Jim Ryun’s high school records.

“Tim wasn’t enjoying it at all,” Bemiller continued. “The neat thing about the pole vault, though, is that it’s up to you when all is said and done.”

When Johnson no-heighted at the NCAA Indoor Outdoor Track and Field Championships in 1995, it was up to Mack. “Here came Timmy Mack,” said “B,” delightedly, “winning it for the Vols [at 18–4¾, 5.61]. That year, Lawrence was the Outdoor champion, and Tim was the Indoor.”

Later honored at a University of Tennessee baseball game, Mack found his celebrity, although modest by the standards of other sports, to be disconcerting. His baseball training at St. Ignatius along with his release point promptly deserted him when he threw out the first pitch.

“I zoned out. I don’t even know if I was on the pitching rubber,” he said. “I looked in at the catcher and proceeded to throw a ball in the dirt that he had to stop by turning his glove over and under-handing it. Very embarrassing.”

In some ways, it was Mack’s lack of success in comparison to Johnson that would eventually allow him to defy the predictions of those ten out of ten people.

Even his gold medal was overshadowed by the gold of fellow Vol Justin Gatlin in the 100 meters in Athens. Gatlin tested positive for synthetic testosterone in 2006 and was banned for eight years from international track and field. Today, on a campus that has named streets for football coaches Gen. Robert Neyland, Johnny Majors and Phil Fulmer, for football players Peyton Manning and Tee Martin, for women’s basketball coach Pat Summit and for women’s basketball player Chamique Holds-claw, there is no “Tim Mack Way.” Perhaps this is because for so long it seemed like the road Tim Mack took would go nowhere.

After graduation, Johnson signed with an agent. He would never better the 19–7½ he had jumped at the age of twenty-two. Although most pole-vaulters are at their best roughly from twenty-two to thirty, it would not be until Mack was thirty-one that he finally jumped higher than LoJo’s best.

With professional earnings at stake, Johnson was, at least in Bemiller’s view, overscheduled. Feeling he was being pushed aside, Bemiller eventually split up with Johnson. “The track and field coach gets the short end in those arrangements,” Bemiller said. “I kind of think the coach is important. Tim saw how it hurt me. I think Tim and I both learned something from what happened with Lawrence.”

The lesson for Mack was that he needed direction in his life and that only in a structured environment with a detailed plan would he ever soar toward the sun. “Most pole-vaulters don’t mature in their technique until their mid- to late twenties,” Bemiller said. “They’ve had some success in college, then they graduate and lose that structure that enabled them to succeed. That was the case with Brian Kelly.”

“Maybe they got a job,” continued Bemiller. “Maybe they started to work to their own schedule. Tim was the smartest one, the one who realized the best thing was to stay with the structure. It’s not real romantic, sticking with the program. But when you would start to see others fall away, Tim Mack kept getting better.”

It was hard staying with it after Mack got his degree—with no money; with no car at first, not even Bemiller’s clunker; with only the kind of jobs most people don’t want to do, backbreaking jobs that raised calluses and lowered pride.

“Was it demeaning?” Mack said. “Sure it was. I had a college degree, and look what I had to do to try to pole-vault. I felt great resentment at athletes who could play golf and who were on SportsCenter. They could just be athletes. I was a working stiff.”

In the spring, when Tennessee was a picture postcard, with blizzards of dogwoods and bursts of azaleas that would defeat Monet’s palette, Mack, his back stooped, his knees protesting, would edge across Bemiller’s one-acre lawn, weeding it, combing it, grooming it into an emerald corner of Paradise. He would root out the dandelions, prying up the round, solar disks that studded the yard like planted sunshine.

“I wanted to make it feel like the vaulters were part of an extended family,” Bemiller said. “I have two daughters and a wife. Anytime I needed heavy labor, I’d enlist some of the vaulters to help out. I have a fiberglass pool, so I’d get them to sand and paint it. We were having a cookout one day after Sunday school, and I told the wife the pool needed time to cure. She filled it up with water and bubbled the paint.”

“That was not a good moment with the pool,” Mack remembered.

He would cut down branches and clear brush. “B” would sometimes slip him some money for services rendered, since Mack’s scholarship had run out with his eligibility. By the time Mack was in graduate school getting his master’s in sports administration, he found that grunt work for his coach was sometimes repaid in coaching sessions.

“It was almost like I had one of those homeless guy’s signs, ‘Will work for coaching.’ I’d be on my hands and knees pulling weeds,” Mack said.

“I’d get out there and help him,” said Bemiller. “I thought this was different from practice. Practice was a time to focus, not to catch up on each other socially.”

Bemiller taught sports law at the university two days a week then coached the pole-vaulters the other two. It was not unusual for “B” to show up to practice in a three-piece suit, fresh from the world of habeas corpus and amicus curiae. “I really respected that,” Mack said. “He had his family, his business, his teaching, his church work, and he still made room for me. He’d ask if I wanted to play golf, which is about the only hobby I have. But the tee time would be 6 A.M. or something, because he had to be done at 9 to get on with everything else in his life.”

As the relationship deepened, Mack occasionally babysat the Be-millers’ daughters. The girls, Kelsey and Gracie, are separated by ten years, with Kelsey being the older. It went better with Mack than with some of the others. “One Sunday afternoon,” said Bemiller, “we had ordered pizza, and one of the vaulters—not Tim—came over and fell asleep. The girls paid the pizza deliveryman and everything. They babysat him!”

He worked at the University of Tennessee Student Recreation Center. He was a janitor. If his roommates needed their cars, he would borrow Andy Knight’s bicycle to get there.

“I had to be there by 6 A.M.,” Mack said. “I had to clean toilets and urinals. Getting outside to sweep the tennis courts was the highlight of my day. There were many times I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was experiencing both ends of the spectrum. I was an elite vaulter who traveled all around the country to participate in meets—I wasn’t in European meets yet—but I also had my arm down a toilet.”

There were other jobs Mack held that fell somewhat south of “desirable” too. He worked at a driving range, behind the wheel of the range cart, collecting the balls. “I was the guy in the little armored car everybody tried to hit,” he said.

He worked at a country club in town “filling buckets of balls for rich guys,” as Russ Johnson said. Also, during his two years as a graduate assistant to the coaches at the University of Tennessee, he had a stint as a ticket seller for the Knoxville Cherokees minor league hockey team. He would “cold call” businesses, hawking season ticket discounts. As a graduate assistant has no room to be picky, Mack did what needed to be done.

“There was ‘Mascot Night,’” Mack said. “They had all these mascots from around town—Smokey, the Tennessee dog; Pucky, which was the Cherokees’ mascot, who was a big black hockey puck with a smiley face. But they needed somebody to put on the costume of the B-97.5 bumblebee.”

WJXB 97.5 on your FM dial was not about to go unrepresented as long as Tim Mack was around. He pulled on the suit and skittered out on the ice in street shoes. “It was really hot in there. It smelled of sweat, like a hockey locker room,” he said.

A little-known drawback to working as a mascot is that the costumes reek. Cans of fabric freshening spray, such as Febreze, are important tools of the trade. “There was no Febreze,” Mack said sourly.

But the biggest problem was not being able to see. “I could only look out one side, through a little hole about one inch by one inch. It was like peeking out a screen door,” he said. “Somehow, I wound up at one end of the rink while all the other mascots were at the other end.”

After Mack shed the bee costume that night—“And I smelled of sweat even then,” he said—he was told to run through the crowd, tossing cardboard boxes containing free slices of pizza to the fans.

Deprivation can discourage a man or make him more determined. Sergey Bubka grew up in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic. While state-supported athletes had it much better than others in the Communist society, it still was never satin sheets and whipped cream. The Bubka in Mack knew that such humble labors made him hungrier. The memory of being the Bee stung.

“It definitely gave me an edge on the Europeans. Their elite vaulters are taken right out of high school and given handpicked coaches. I never had that. I went through years of trial and error. There is no substitute for that.”

More deprivation was coming at the 1996 Olympic Trials in Atlanta and their aftermath.

LoJo won the 1996 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in Atlanta at 19–0¼ (5.80). Mack, as much the “other” guy from the University of Tennessee as he would ever be, didn’t qualify for the final. It was no surprise. His personal best was a half-foot lower than the winning mark.

“I’m pretty realistic,” he said. “Eighteen-six was my best, so I knew it was going to be a challenge. The worst thing was that I was tentative. I tried not to hit the bar rather than to make it. I had no plan really.”

Unprepared mentally and unready physically, Mack was left with what he brought with him into Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium: his character. “I stayed to watch the final,” he said. “If I screw up, I stay and suffer. A lot of people wouldn’t. I wanted it to sit in my stomach. I wanted it to burn. I wanted to remember what it felt like.”

“He was overmatched,” Bemiller said. “Different people take different approaches. It didn’t surprise me at all that Tim let it burn in him. I knew he would do anything he could every day to get a little better.”

With only the graduate assistantship on which to rely, without even a whiff of Olympic glory, Mack began the hardest years of his life. For four years, he worked as a fitness trainer at a club called National Fitness Center, operated by Gus Captain, the man who ran the sandwich shop Mack frequented near campus. Gus would open the fitness club at 5 A.M., and Mack would relieve him an hour later. Gus and his son, John, were another supportive group Mack found just in time. “They worked around my schedule as much as possible,” Mack said. “I would ask for time off three days before I was going to leave for South Africa and things like that. I wasn’t anything then, but they believed in me.”

The job kept him in shape, but his wallet stayed lean and mean too.

“I never got to the point where I thought I was going to hang it up,” he said. “But 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.”

He had no sponsors, so he sent out polite letters into which crept a pleading tone. Contributors could sponsor Mack at any of three levels: gold, silver or bronze.

“Gold level was for a $5,000–7,000 donation per year,” he said. “If you gave that much, you got to use my name for promotional purposes. You got a link to my Web site. You got my quarterly newsletter. And I guaranteed a personal appearance.

“Silver,” he added, “was for $2,000–5,000 per year. You got everything but the personal appearance.

“Bronze,” he concluded, “was for $500–2,000. You got the Web site and the quarterly newsletter.”

The letters went to Knoxville’s Sea Ray Boats, to Pilot Oil, to the energy snack Balance Bar, to Goody’s Clothing in Knoxville, to Mack Trucks, and to Bernie Kosar, the ugly-duckling quarterback who set Cleveland’s heart on fire with his play in the 1980s. Mack hoped one Cleveland underdog, the ungainly, cerebral Kosar, would help another.

The results?

“No takers,” Mack said. “Not a one. The Mack Trucks thing was a big disappointment. I had high hopes for it. I considered it a natural.”

The failures to reply left him to his personal support system: the M&D Track Club. “It’s what Tim would put on meet applications,” Arlene said. “Tim was the only member. It meant Mom & Dad Track Club.”

The Macks spent as much as $8,000 a year keeping Tim’s unlikely Olympic dream alive. Then came 1997, when Mack lost an entire season to injury. By its end, he would have jumped forever for the Mom & Dad Track Club just so long as he could jump at all.

The great thing about sports is that they symbolize the ability to overcome hardship. This is where the “life lessons” that are part of every coach’s message are learned. Nothing is harder than doing without the sport you love. Tim Mack did love pole vaulting, despite the hard edge his menial jobs away from the track gave him, despite the long years of disappointment and defeat, despite devoting the whole of himself, all his life’s work, to clearing a bar, despite the repressive way in which it made him leash his emotions, despite a life stripped bare of adornments. He loved it and, Lord, in 1997, he missed it.

Although he didn’t know it at first, Mack had incurred a serious strain of the left high adductor muscle in his groin. There are five adductors, the pectineus and adductor brevis and longus that connect the pelvis to the thigh bone, in addition to the adductor magnus and gracilis that run from the pelvis to the knee. They act to pull the legs together and can be injured in sprinting, twisting, and hurdling. The pole vault is a sport tailor-made for groin pulls.

Mack didn’t know what was wrong at first. He went to orthopedists in Knoxville. He saw specialists at the esteemed Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. He searched the Internet on his roommates’ computers, printing out information on what might be wrong. “No one said it was this specific thing and to do this specific treatment,” said Mack. “All they did was rule stuff out.”

While he worried and fussed, Mack put himself through various rehab treatments. He had ultrasound treatments, endured massages, and worked with surgical tubing, pulling one end of it with his leg, much as in plyometric exercises. He rode an exercise bicycle with handles he could pull back and forth for some approximation of cardiovascular work. He jogged gingerly.

Mack had always been a man who did everything that was asked and then some. “I think I overtrained,” he said. “I pushed it a little bit with the first twinge, instead of resting. I pushed so hard that I couldn’t even run.”

He could do little. He was alone. Bemiller was busy coaching the University of Tennessee vaulters. “I was basically by myself. ‘B’ wasn’t the one going on the Internet to try to find out what was wrong and making the doctors’ appointments,” Mack said. “I thought I would never get it diagnosed and never get it healed. I’d be driving home to Cleveland in tears.”

He watched video of himself repeatedly, a bird who could only marvel that once he had flown. “I vowed that once I got back, it was over,” he said. “The other guys are not going to know what happened.”

Quitting was not an option.

“Others might have wanted to get out,” he said. “I was not jumping that well then. I had not made much money at it. I could’ve hung it up. But I thought it was just another test. If there was any blessing in that year, it was finding out how much I loved the sport and how much I missed it.”

After almost eight months of rest and rehabilitation, Mack finally received treatment at the Cleveland Clinic that completed the healing process. There, he received a cortisone shot. Cortisone is a steroid, and steroids, of course, became the blight of track and field in the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal. One of the drug’s effects is that it increases the force of skeletal muscle contraction, a definite advantage in making a forceful plant. The pole vault has been relatively unscathed by the steroid scandal, although South African Commonwealth Games champion Okkert Brits tested positive for the stimulant ephedrine in January 2003. Janine Whitlock, the British record-holder, served a two-year suspension ending in 2005 after a positive test for Dianabol, a throwback steroid that was in vogue in the 1970s. Another British pole-vaulter, Mike Edwards, tested positive for stanozolol, the steroid that brought down both sprinter Ben Johnson and baseball star Rafael Palmeiro.

The steroid injection Mack took was legal as a medical treatment. It was also his last recourse. “I was told to rest it another couple of weeks, and it should be fine. I don’t think I would have come back so fast without doing the other therapy. Even just walking to the car, it felt better,” Mack said.

Mack had learned how much he loved the sport, but he hadn’t learned enough about it to reach his ultimate goals. In 2000, an Olympic year, the problems he encountered, the deficiencies he discovered in himself, would reshape him physically and mentally. By the next Olympics, he would become, as rival Derek Miles said in surprise, “a whole new jumper.”

Mack is a blend of dreamer and realist. He would grab the greatest prize in his sport in Athens by taking precise notes on what led to failure or what caused success. But pole vaulting is also about the athletic state of grace known as being in “The Zone.” Mack could only verbalize it in terms of his beloved golf: “It’s like a perfect drive in the middle of the fairway, really hitting it sweet, and when the ball goes off the clubhead, it’s really smoking. It’s all those things, only nearly 20 feet in the air.”

It is about more than numbers; it is about “altius,” the “higher” in the Olympic motto. It has an epic quality of grandeur to it. You need movies, you need Dolby sound and whiz-bang special effects to do justice to those feelings, and so Tim Mack became a movie buff.

He liked Dumb and Dumber, the 1994 Jim Carrey classic. When Carrey buys a Tennessee orange tuxedo, complete with top hat, he breaks into an impromptu jig. “The Tennessee Shuffle,” Mack called it, after copying it and, for a time, breaking into it after big clearances and PRs.

“Tim needs to go back to the Tennessee Shuffle,” said Greg Hull. “Showmanship is never bad for a sport.”

He liked Varsity Blues, with its exhortation to “Play like gods out there!” He liked Remember the Titans, with the locker room vow: “Nothing will ever break us apart.” He liked Rocky—“the ultimate underdog movie,” as he called it. He would, in the future, come to love A Knight’s Tale. But in the year 2000, what he liked most was Gladiator, Russell Crowe’s Oscar-winning turn as a Roman general/gladiator.

“I was a gladiator for Halloween in 2000,” said Mack. “I made the mask, had a sword, bought a little shield.”

He and Russ Johnson used the movie as motivation. “Russ made a motivational tape for me where Russell Crowe removes his mask and reveals himself as a great general. We both would watch it when we were roommates to psych up before a big meet,” said Mack.

Mack jumped 19 feet (19–0¾, 5.80) for the first time at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in June 2000. He was almost twenty-seven years old, a gladiator with the blood and dust of countless arenas on him. For the first time, he had ventured where the sky captains went, to duel them on their blue battlegrounds.

“Tim and I drove a rented Ford Focus down to Chapel Hill,” said Russ Johnson. “It was one month before the Olympic Trials. He was so pumped because his mother had told him she would buy him a computer if he jumped 19 feet.”

O’Hare said he saw a new level of confidence in Mack after that. But the Olympic Trials that year shook Mack. He didn’t feel right going to Sacramento. In retrospect, he would believe he had gotten stale—that he had overtrained and his body couldn’t respond.

“I had worked too hard to try to get my speed up,” Mack said. “I could feel I wasn’t real sharp going into the Trials. I could feel it coming on. I couldn’t get on stiffer poles because I didn’t have the speed to bend them.”

The pole-vaulters always talk about the wind that week in Sacramento and how it took the strongest of jumpers to tame it. Bemiller thought that was the biggest problem. “Lawrence Johnson and Nick Hysong handled the bad conditions in Sacramento,” the coach said. “Strength was Lawrence’s biggest asset. They were two strong guys and they had a big advantage.”

The big shock was that Jeff Hartwig, the American record holder at 19–9¼ (6.03), no-heighted in the preliminaries. Johnson jumped 19–1½ (5.83) to win. Hysong was next at 18–9½ (5.73). Mack was eighth, going out at 18–1¾ (5.53).

“Tim got on too small a pole,” Bemiller said. “He didn’t get on a big enough pole fast enough, and he never really got into the meet. He didn’t adjust to the conditions.”

Mack hit the bar going up on his last jump. “It was a fairly decent jump, but so much else was going on that I couldn’t adjust,” he said.

Both coach and jumper knew serious changes had to be made for Mack to be a real contender. “He needed to improve his strength and posture,” said Bemiller. “On a good day, with good conditions, without a tough set-up, he was in the ballpark with everyone else. If the wind was swirling and conditions were tough, he lost his posture. He would lean forward near the end of the run. And he wasn’t as strong as the other guys.”

“I worked so hard. As the year progresses, I usually move back a step on the runway because I’m stronger, and I’ll cover more ground,” said Mack. “In 2000 I was moving up on it. Yet I ignored it. I thought hard work would cure anything. After that, I decided I would listen to my body. I decided, if anything, I would be undertrained for 2004.”

“That burned in him too,” Bemiller said. “You’re not getting anything from the pole vault except what you accomplish. You have to come to terms with the fact that it’s pretty much for yourself. Sacramento was ten years of his life [at the University of Tennessee] up to that time. He couldn’t make that up in money in the next four or five years.”

The gladiator needed to be stronger. He also needed to be a better general.