The Wizard of Foz by Bob Welch

Author:Bob Welch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

… It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us ….

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

IN THE DARKNESS of the drive, Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” pounded from the radio as Dick Fosbury guided his blue-and-white Chevy II south on Interstate 5, out of Oregon and into California. It was early evening hours on July 14, 1968, and life was good—good, that is, if you could forget about, or at least temporarily disconnect from, the haunting photo of Bobby Kennedy lying near death on a hotel pantry floor; the Memphis police officer taking a nightstick to a young black man as if chopping wood; and the wounded US soldier in Vietnam with his arms wrapped around the necks of two buddies as a fellow soldier raises his arms to the heavens, either to guide in an evacuation helicopter or to cry out to God.

Author William Manchester called 1968 “the year everything went wrong.” Assassinations. War. Bitter protests. Racial tensions. All happened, all served up on the nightly news, now often in living color. And yet, for Fosbury, 1968 was the year everything was going right. He’d found out a few weeks before, in mid-June, that he wasn’t going to be drafted, apparently—and ironically—because of an unsound back. He’d emerged as one of the top high jumpers in the world. And he’d placed first at the Trials in Los Angeles and was looking forward to the Olympics. It wasn’t an insensitivity to the pain of others that led Dick to appreciate the good fortune of his own. Simply put, he felt blessed.

“Dick Fosbury,” wrote Track & Field News’ Jon Hendershott in the July issue, “has turned high jumping upside down.”

Fosbury was headed to South Lake Tahoe, California, for six weeks of high-altitude training capped by an Olympic Trials that would be nothing but a workout for him. Two hundred athletes would be arriving from all over the country, each having finished in the top ten in Los Angeles—or been granted a waiver because of injury or some other reason.

Fosbury knew little about this training camp that the USOC had placed in the High Sierra: only that it was chosen largely because its elevation, 7,377 feet, replicated that of Mexico City. And that a Tartan track—and field-event setups—had been plopped down in the middle of some forest. And that it was only twenty minutes from Stateline, Nevada, where gambling casinos beckoned. Fosbury might have looked sixteen, but Dick would be more than happy to provide a driver’s license that showed that, as of March 6, he was, indeed, twenty-one.

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