It doesn’t hurt to have some smack-talking French swimmers goad that along.
Michael Phelps deservedly gobbles up most of the attention - and everything else with his 12,000-calories-a-day diet - but one of the true early defining moments for the United States came with Phelps out of the pool.
When 400-meter freestyle relay anchor Jason Lezak miraculously overtook France’s Alain Bernard for the gold with the fastest 100 split in history, the shot of Phelps and his teammates’ unrestrained joy was priceless.
To hear athletes such as gymnast Shawn Johnson and a superstar of the magnitude of Kobe Bryant express humbled awe at being blessed enough to put on a uniform to represent, as Bryant said, “the greatest country in the world” is inspirational.
Sometimes the willowy among us fret and sweat over what other countries might think of us. These athletes innately understand American exceptionalism and don’t apologize for it.
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The rise of Temple High School graduates Mike Hazle and Stewart Glenister to Olympic berths brings Beijing into our neighborhood. It’s a rare treat for a community to get to follow the exploits of their own on the world stage.
If not for a freak accident at the 1976 Olympic trials, one of the greatest track athletes Temple has produced would almost certainly have been a key part of the U.S. team in Montreal.
Cookie Gainer, a 1975 Temple grad, had made the team as a sprinter. She had been an integral part of Mildred “Lanky” Lancaster’s three relay teams that set state records and even a national record in the mile relay. By 1976 she was competing for Prairie View A&M and well on her way to vie for Olympic medals.
But while warming up on the infield at the trials, she stepped on a board with a nail in it that had inexplicably been left there, ending her Olympic hopes that summer.
“It broke my heart. I think it hurt me more than it hurt her,” Lancaster recalled. “She could’ve really done something that year.”
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The local and Central Texas attention from the 1976 Games was focused on Johnny “Lam” Jones.
Jones’s record-setting exploits that spring as a member of the Lampasas track and field squad were already the stuff of legend.
His anchor leg on the Badgers’ mile-relay team at the high school state meet at Texas’ Memorial Stadium in Austin is still a point of awed recollection of those in attendance. I suspect the number of people who claim to have been there that May evening has swelled far beyond the actual crowd total, but it’s hard to embellish what transpired in the final event of the Class 3A division.
Jones took the baton in eighth place - dead last - with the leaders already completing the first turn. One by one, with the public-address announcer counting them down, Jones ran down all of them and broke the tape with room to spare. That was probably the most electrifying sports event this 12-year-old spectator had ever witnessed live.
Jones parlayed that state gold into Olympic gold in Montreal as part of the USA’s sprint relay team. He returned from Montreal to a hero’s welcome in Lampasas with a day given in his honor. Soon after, Jones began a football career at Texas before spending a few years in the NFL with the New York Jets.
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For golf enthusiasts on this side of the pond, Padraig Harrington might not have been the first name to come to mind to capture the Tiger-less Grand Slam sweepstakes. Obviously, it should have been.
The Irishman has the all-around game and the demeanor to stack up titles on the world’s hardest courses. He has muscled his way to the No. 3 spot in the world rankings with a bullet. He’s won three of the last six majors - the only man not named Tiger to have achieved that since Tom Watson in the early 1980s. He now holds as many major titles as other Tiger Era greats such as Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh and Ernie Els.
Could a Paddy Slam be in his future?
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To watch one of Texas’ top 100 college football prospects for the 2009 recruiting class as defined by Rivals.com, those of us in East Bell County must go west.
Tanner Brock of Copperas Cove, Rhontae Scales of Killeen and Daniel Cobb of Killeen Ellison check in at Nos. 66, 68 and 74, respectively.
Brock, a 6-3, 220-pound linebacker, has verbally committed to Texas Christian, where his brother Logan was a redshirt freshman last year. The younger Brock racked up 224 tackles, 23 for loss, in ’07 as the Bulldawgs reached their second consecutive Class 4A Division I state final.
Scales, a 6-5, 285-pound Texas A&M commitment, ranks 29th among all high school offensive tackles in Texas. Cobb is a speedy safety pledged to Texas Tech and is coming off a season in which he picked off four passes and had 100 tackles.
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Salado filled a couple of head coaching slots in its girls program during the summer.
Randy Henderson inherits a young and talented Lady Eagle basketball team from Beth Moses, who has moved into a solely teaching position. Samantha Jackson is replacing Doug Harrigan as the Lady Eagles’ softball coach.
If you’re scoring at home, the addition of the former Samantha Borgeson gives the Salado staff a trio of Rogers alums in authority roles.
Jackson joins athletic director/football coach Jeff Cheatham and girls athletic coordinator Cindy Mayfield Mewhinney. By the way, Cheatham, beginning his ninth season at Salado, takes over as dean of District 25-2A football coaches following the departure of Jarrell’s Randy Franklin.
