U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL : COMMENTARY : For Him, the High of Jumping Is in the Fun

If a track meet were a day at school, Hollis Conway would be recess. Leave the mathematics of the high jump to the statistics freaks, the science to the coaches, the history to the reporters.

Conway simply wants to have fun.

The night before he set the American high jump record last year at 7 feet 10 inches, Conway couldn’t sleep. Among world-class track athletes, this isn’t an uncommon affliction. But with Conway, it wasn’t from nerves or pressure or even indigestion.

“I stayed up all night playing video games,” he says.

Most athletes gear for big meets with a staff of coaches, trainers and workout partners. Conway has the Super Mario Brothers. “I like playing action games,” he says. “If I play really well, I know my coordination is on. If I don’t, the next day I’ll be so clumsy, I’ll stumble over a dime.”

Conway is easy to spot during a track competition. He’s the one laughing and talking with anyone who will listen. But, as Emilio Estevez said in “Repo Man,” track is intense. Sometimes, no one is willing to listen. So Conway finds ways to entertain himself.

“Sometimes in competition, people don’t like to talk and it gets boring,” Conway says. “So I put on my Walkman and put on something fast. Nothing slow. Too slow and I get sleepy. I want something to wake me up.

“And I don’t even have to hear it--I’ll sing. It’ll sound bad, but I’ll sing.”

Conway plays all the hits. Except for, maybe, Twitty. “Soul, R&B;, rap, whatever,” he says. “When I’m over in Europe, I’ll listen to MTV and when I come home, I’ll be singing it. I’ll sing anything I hear. You got to be versatile when you’re over in Europe.”

Conway can’t relate to the track-and-field mind that is able to dissect the whole journey from approach to flop, visualizing it hundreds of times before the body is prepared to perfect it.

Conway knows the object is to jump high.

“I can never focus only on the high jump,” he says. “When I’m out on the apron, it’s just a matter of doing it. I can’t see myself out there, thinking about every step for 2 1/2 hours. I’d be mentally drained.”

Even at that, however, Conway believes he thinks too much.

“I know I could jump eight feet,” he says, alluding to the current world’s record held by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba. “The whole year, I train pretty hard and I get to a meet where I feel really good and I think, ‘No, this is not the time.’

“It was like that earlier with 7-10. ‘What if I jump it too early in the year?’ Who wants to jump 7-10 in March?

“Then I get to the bar and say, ‘Wait, I do,” and by then, it’s too late.”

The moral, according to Conway?

“I’ve got to keep jumping and stop thinking.”

Conway, 23 going on 13, will try again in today’s final afternoon of competition at the 1990 U.S. Olympic Festival. He says he’s been clearing 7-8 in practice “pretty easy” but is making no predictions about the real thing. “I don’t know what to expect,” he says, “but then, I never do.”

He reports that he is a little sore and suspects he’s been overtraining. “My big problem is that after a hard practice session, I’ll go play tennis for three hours. It’s the extra stuff that wears me down.”

Conway also likes company when he trains. So he runs with the sprinters. “And I have to keep up with them,” he says. Or, he will train with a few women distance runners. “I can’t let any girls beat me,” he says.

Conway always has considered track and field a little too stiff in the collar, a little too stuffed in the shirt. The stopwatch-and-calculator crowd will tell you that Conway takes his sport less seriously than 99.125% of the competition.

Wind-aided or otherwise.

“I don’t think I could ever be serious about it,” Conway says. “Seriousness takes the fun out of it. If I got too serious, over the years, I might get tired of it.”

Sometimes, though, the coldness of the real world can’t help but encroach on Conway’s. Two weeks ago, on July 1, Pleas Conway, 61, died of a heart attack in Shreveport, La.

Hollis Conway lost his father and his biggest fan.

“Dad would watch me on TV,” Conway said. “He’d save every article. If I wanted to keep good things in the paper, I had to win.”

Pleas also kept Hollis focused, or at least as much as humanly possible.

“Mom and Dad both kept a lot of pressure on,” Conway says. “They don’t know much about track and field, but they wanted to see me win. I couldn’t come home and say, ‘It was cold, it was rainy.’ They just wanted me to win.

“Sometimes, they’d be at one of my meets and they’d holler, ‘Why didn’t you make it?’ It’s a little embarrassing, people yelling out after you made a bad jump.”

Conway misses it already.

“I still see him all the time, clearly, in my head,” he says. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect me. It’s the first time it’s ever happened to me. It’s weird.”

But at least, Conway says, his dad was able to make the trip to Seoul for the 1988 Olympics. There, Pleas watched his son clear 7-8 3/4 and win a silver medal.

“He had a stroke just before Seoul and the doctors were skeptical of letting him go,” Conway says. “But they did let him go. He went to Seoul.”

And for that, Conway will be glad for the rest of his life.

“We had some fun.”