Fate Again Plays a Trick on Myricks

When Italian track officials confessed that the lifting of the bronze medal for long jumping at the World Championships, from American Larry Myricks to Italian Giovanni Evangelisti, had been a heist, lots of sportsmen in the world were stunned.

Not anybody who knew Larry Myricks. They merely looked at each other and nodded. If it could happen to anybody, it would happen to Larry Myricks. Larry has every right to look up at the heavens, shake his head and say with conviction “Me, again, huh, God?” Or “When is it going to be my turn?”

It’s always Larry’s turn. In the barrel, that is. Larry is fate’s favorite whipping boy. Every so often, the muse of history seems to come along and say “Where’s Larry Myricks? I feel like kicking somebody.”

If you never heard of Larry Myricks, there’s a good reason for that.

Look, a few years back, there was a great racehorse, name of Sham. He broke the Kentucky Derby record, he broke the Preakness record.

Don’t look for Sham in the record books, though, because he finished second in both of those races. Secretariat broke them by more. Sham had the rotten luck to come along at the same time as Secretariat. A horse named Alydar chased the great Affirmed right into immortality but himself got photoed out of it. And so on.

Wilt Chamberlain might have been able to take all basketball home with him and hang it on his wall--except he came along at the same time as Bill Russell. The ‘40s and ‘50s might have been known as the Snead era in golf--if Ben Hogan hadn’t come along to make it the Hogan era.

Larry Myricks is too good an athlete not to have his time in the spotlight all to himself, too.

He never has. Fate had it in for him.

You see, Larry was a long jumper, and he was the best in history--this side of the great aberration of track and field history, Bob Beamon’s 29-foot 2 1/2-inch Olympic jump at 7,500 feet in Mexico in 1968.

But what happened, and kept happening, to Larry Myricks should only have happened to the guy who shot Gandhi.

It all began with the 1976 Olympics. Myricks, only 19, had startled the track world by finishing second in the long jump at the Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore. He was nicely qualified for the Olympic finals at Montreal, too, when he heard a pop in his foot as he was leisurely warming up on the runway. He had broken a bone in his right ankle. Exit medal No. 1.

Larry slowly healed his way back into contention. Gradually, he became the world’s best long jumper. In 1979, at the World Cup meet, he jumped 27-11 1/2, the best ever at sea level. He obliterated East Germany’s Lutz Dombrowski, whose best that day was 27-1 1/2.

Myricks would have been the odds-on favorite in the Olympics the next year and a safe bet to become the first jumper over 28 feet--Beamon had jumped 29 feet without ever jumping 28.

Well, it was Dombrowski who jumped 28 feet and won the gold medal in the ’80 Olympics. Jimmy Carter wouldn’t let Myricks go. Exit medal No. 2.

It was about this time that Carl Lewis came along.

Now, history can’t record what Sham thought when he looked over in the starting gate and saw Secretariat there, or whether Alydar said to himself, “Aw . . . Not him again!” when he saw Affirmed in the post parade.

Did Chamberlain think, “Who is this guy?!” the first time Russell blocked one of his shots, and was Snead ready to hear, “You’re away, Sam,” the first time Hogan said it?

But Myricks knew he was in for trouble the first time he saw Lewis jump 28 feet alongside him in Sacramento. “He moved right in and set up shop,” Larry confides ruefully.

The trouble with Lewis was, he was a one-man track team. He got his gold medals in clusters. He wasn’t just a long jumper, he was a legend. He got the headlines, the money, the acclaim. Myricks got second.

His perverse genies weren’t through with him, either. In the ’84 Olympics, a gold medal was probably wishful thinking, but a silver was not only possible but probable. But with only 27-0 1/2 to overcome for his silver, Larry Myricks came down at a shocking 20-7 3/4 on his final jump. He had jumped that far in grade school.

“I thought I fouled, so I quit the jump in mid-air,” Myricks explains. He hadn’t fouled. The Australian, Greg Honey, and Evangelisti got “his” medals. Exit medal No. 3.

So, no one should have been surprised when the officials in the World Championships gave Evangelisti his medal at Rome last September. This time, though, the theft was too brazen. The friendly official had awarded Evangelisti a 27-6 on a jump that went no more than 26-10. As videotapes and electronic triangulations subsequently proved.

The Italian federation shame-facedly turned the bronze medal over to Myricks belatedly last month, after stripping Evangelisti of it.

Larry is not overjoyed.

“What they’d really have to do to duplicate the conditions is, fill the arena and put me on world television and let me hear the cheers I would have at the time,” he says. “Getting a medal in a box by air express isn’t the same thing.”

It’s the story of Larry Myricks’ life. He’s like that character in Li’l Abner who used to go around with a dark cloud over his head.

He has one more Olympic shot. Which is why he is appearing in the Mt. SAC Relays at Walnut next weekend. Carl Lewis will concentrate on the sprints, the Mt. SAC Relays are known for their scrupulously honest timings and measurements and, all in all, Larry looks free of his private demons and gremlins for this one week at least.

They’re probably waiting for him to get to Seoul.