Freddogg Off The Chain

Rodney Smith jumped so high he jumped right out of his shorts. The spring of 1984 I am at the Delaware State Championships as the Head Track Coach at Cape Henlopen in Lewes Delaware with a personal record 5’2” in the high jump set 10 years earlier during a decathlon for over the hill athletes with disposable time to spend on themselves.
But now I am the coach of a squirrelly athlete who is a threat to break the magical seven foot mark. I am excited and nervous and as I look down from outside the fence beyond the opposite end zone I see Rodney clear 6’6” without his shorts. Rodney was one of the first to compete in tights but the rule says track issued uniform which included pants at least it did the last time I checked with my other guys.
It was time for me to go to work. I had to talk an athlete out of his pants and if you think that’s easy in a crowded stadium it is not. Luckily a 45 foot skinny shot putter who I had coached down to 37 feet by the end of the season was done for his career and so in exchange for all the hotdogs he could eat he came out of his shorts.
I then got Rodney over to the fence explained to him the precarious position in which he had placed himself and had to practically choke him before it sunk in that if he jumped 9 feet without his shorts the rules committee would ecstatically and joyfully toss him from the record books because many appointed judges get off on that type of stuff.
Rodney cleared 6’8” in his gold shorts when I detected the Meet Director standing next to me. “No thanks I just ate, ”I joked.
“I’ve been told your guy was jumping without his pants on?”
“People be telling you some dumb stuff, ”I said. “Did you ever notice that Porky Pig never wears pants?”
The Director was not swayed. “I am asking you point blank did he compete without pants earlier in the competition?”
“Here’s what I’m telling you about my college bound state champion high jumper. If you look down there he is wearing pants. That’s what I see and that’s all I know. I am his coach. Do you think I’m going to spend a chummy moment with you divulging a perception that may be an illusion or a hallucination? Just let it go!”
Rodney asked is his typical arrogant way to have the bar raised to 7 feet because he had already won at 6’8” and who cared about that? The judge and crew looked at him like,”Yea right, whatever?”
And so an actual step ladder came out and a tape with metric on one side and whatever it is that we Americans use on the other. Seven feet first attempt.
Rodney nailed seven feet with enough room underneath his butt for a sofa cushion. It was Bemonesque as Smith annoyingly circled the pit over and over and over again. But if you know Track and Field you know that sometimes in an athlete’s greatest moment of triumph a tragic twist that only those on the Hindenburg could explain comes down to smother your world.
By rule a record setting jump must be measured before and after the clearance, Clarence. The bar was re-measured over and over and kept coming up 6’10.5”. Smith who could have been tossed for no pants snapped at judges who just kept scratching this heads like “How we do that?”
Jerry McGuire of the Delaware State News interviewed Smith and asked him what it felt like to clear seven feet only to be told later it was 6’10.5”?
“It was like being told your parents had been killed in an airplane crash,” Smith said.
McGuire honored Smith with Quote of the Year in the following News Year Day edition. Rodney went on to a four year career of sprinting and jumping and hurdling at Saint Joseph’s College but never again cleared or thought he cleared 7 feet.
Smith was once overheard responding to the question: ”What about your high school coach?”
“He was a nice guy,”Smith said, but didn’t know all that much about track.”
But I do now a thing or two about pants and mathematical conversions from metric to English and official tape measures that lie in the wet grass until needed. It’s all so imperfect and yet there is a certain symmetry to this story.