A Second Opinion on Being First

“If you aspire to the highest place it is no disgrace to stop at the second, or even the third.” --Orations of Cicero, 55 B.C.

In 1851, in the waters off the south of England, the definitive word on finishing second was delivered by the members of the Royal Yacht Squadron Club just after they had been beaten in a regatta by the invading schooner, America.

Queen Victoria digested the news and then signaled: “Who was second?”

Back came the embarrassed message: “Your Majesty, there is no second.”

It is a notion reinforced by a generation of American football coaches. “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” is ascribed to Vince Lombardi, but the chances are that the line was first uttered by Napoleon at Waterloo or Hannibal in the Alps.

Americans don’t consider not winning a disgrace, exactly. They just kind of avoid discussing it. It isn’t as if it were the nonwinner’s fault. It’s as if he has some infirmity you pretend not to notice. You try to talk around it.

Someone once said--it was probably an owner--that it was better not to have gone to the Super Bowl at all than to have gone and lost.

Coaches who go and lose “can’t win the big ones,” according to the whispers going around about them.

If you’re in the company of Dan Marino and Don Shula this winter, make book on how many times the subject of Super Bowl XIX does not come up. The weather, the situation in the Middle East, and tax reform will all take precedence over football. It’s as if they had a mortifying communicable disease that polite people don’t talk about.

Which is why I was enormously cheered recently to note where a triple-jumper, of all people, is about to strike a blow for second finishers everywhere.

Mike Conley, who was probably America’s best triple-jumper, if not the world’s, going into the 1984 Olympics, sprained his ankle on his first jump at the Games and finished second, by three inches, to Al Joyner, winning the silver to Joyner’s gold.

A tragedy, right? Something to be quickly forgotten, put out of the mind, concealed like some past indiscretion?

Not exactly. Not according to Conley’s way of thinking.

He did something that, to my knowledge, has never been done before. He took to showing up at meets in an outfit of silver--silver shoes, silver skivvies and, of course, his silver medal.

Cicero would have understood perfectly. Shula might not.

What Mike Conley was saying was: “Hey, look at me! I was one of the top people in the whole world at what I do. Better than all but one guy! Isn’t that terrific?! How many people you know can make that statement?”

Heretofore, silver medals were something you threw in a trunk and tried to forget. After all, they were a reminder of how close you had come to immortality. And missed.

How many people will remember who was second to Carl Lewis in any of his 1984 gold-medal victories? Does the name Kirk Baptiste mean anything to you? Sam Graddy ring a bell? Do you remember that Mack Robinson, Jackie’s brother, was within a tick of Jesse Owens at Berlin in 1936? Who was second in last year’s Kentucky Derby? Whom did Lincoln beat in 1864?

Mike Tully is another case in point. In 1978, Tully was America’s, and one of the world’s, best pole vaulters, consistently over 18 feet. Even 19 feet was in range.

Like a lot of Americans, he lost interest, to say nothing of form, when the boycott of the Moscow Games was ordered. He dropped out for 18 months.

Now, pole vaulting, like diamond cutting or playing golf, is a skill that has to be renewed and refined or it is lost. It calls for a precise set of maneuverings that depend for execution on endless repetition.

The pole vault was an event that was never lost by America in the Olympics until 1972, and has not been won by America since.

So, when Tully geared up for one more campaign in 1982, a lot of people thought it was a waste of time that might better be spent on his budding film career. After all, the Soviets were scraping ceilings in indoor meets in Europe, the French had their own facility just for vaulters. Tully frequently had to rig up his own crossbar in an empty lot and hope the owner didn’t show up.

The 1984 Olympics burst on such a shower of gold medals for Americans that the original telecasts sounded like recruiting posters. The chauvinism got so shrill that one swimmer, who only got a gold medal and not a world record, too, was thrown into a fit of depression.

In this atmosphere, Tully narrowly lost out to an undersized Frenchman in the pole vault. He wasn’t so much outjumped as outstrategied. The French vaulters, winner Pierre Quinon and bronze medalist Thierry Vigneron, maneuvered him into a box where he had to pass at the dangerous height of 18 feet 10 inches, then try 19-.

“The 18-10 would only have tied me, and we would have had to go at 19 anyway,” Tully said, shrugging.

Tully missed his 19-foot jumps--and his gold medal. But his accomplishment was one of the top feats of the U.S. team.

Silver is a precious metal, too. Cicero was right. Yes, Your Majesty, there is a second, and we are proud.