Embracing a Revolutionary Form of Activity : Glendale’s Donna McDonough-Beard Has a Fling With the Hammer Throw

Anyone who has spent long hours with a hammer knows of its dangers. Its invention has been traced to the Stone Age when Urg carelessly brought one of those new stone-lashed-to-a-stick contraptions down upon his hairy thumb and let out a cascade of vulgarities.

And that’s just the carpenter’s hammer. The sissy hammer.

The real hammer is a much more fearsome looking thing, a nasty steel ball weighing many pounds attached to a wire and a handle, an implement likely invented as a weapon back in the days of Urg, something that could be propelled with great force at a mighty animal.

Today, the hammer throw is not a means of driving away mammals but rather a track and field event. Other than that small change, however, it hasn’t changed much.

The competitors still tend to be huge-shouldered men.

So just what in the name of Cro-Magnon man is Donna McDonough-Beard, a pretty and highly civilized schoolteacher from Glendale, doing whirring around and around with the heavy ball and sending it thudding into the earth over and over again?

“I really enjoy the individualism of it,” she said. “Being able to work at something and trying to perfect it.

“Plus, you can do it in almost any weather. The wind doesn’t take it.”

This is true. The tornado that carried Dorothy’s house to Oz couldn’t knock a flying hammer off course.

McDonough-Beard, 27, played basketball, tennis and softball at Hoover High, and during four years at Azusa Pacific she learned to throw the javelin and discus and to put the shot. But it wasn’t until last year, four years after leaving college, that she first latched onto the steel cable connected to the hammer ball.

And even though it is very heavy, she picked it up quickly.

On March 9, McDonough-Beard threw the 8.8-pound ball farther than she had ever thrown it before, 151 feet. That throw easily beat the qualifying mark of 146 feet set by The Athletics Congress in the fledgling women’s event and put her into the TAC Championships to be held June 13-15 in New York.

Unfortunately for her, that is as far as the ball likely will ever carry her. There is no women’s hammer throw in the Olympics, or even in the Olympic Sports Festival, which takes place this summer in Los Angeles.

She might yet compete in the festival, however, because, in addition to throwing the hammer, she is an accomplished weightlifter and could take part in the festival in that role.

Her interest in the hammer came, she said, at roughly the same time she met her husband-to-be, Chris Beard, the Occidental College record-holder in the event. Beard, it should be noted, is an exception to the stereotypical grunting-beast group of hammer throwers. He is working on a master’s degree in kinesiology at UCLA.

“He got me to try it,” she said, “and I just liked it. I know it seems strange to most people. Actually, it seems strange to me too. But it certainly is different, and for some reason I fell in love with throwing the thing.”

Even for people with experience in other field events such as the discus, adjusting to the hammer is not easy. The weight of the ball (men throw a 16-pound version) as it revolves around the thrower quickly builds up a great amount of force. And whether the person wants it to, the body rapidly begins to follow the ball in revolution. Three full turns under such force leave the inner ear begging for mercy as a feeling of dizziness creeps in.

It is no wonder, then, that all beginners and even some veterans often heave the ball wildly.

“You can throw this thing in any direction, very easily,” said Mike Diller, the Occidental throwing coach who oversaw the career of Beard and watches McDonough-Beard frequently during her workouts at the school’s hammer field.

“Throwing it backward is common,” Diller said. “Directly to either side is popular too. And, once in a while, a guy gets really disoriented and lets it fly straight up. That can be dangerous.”

McDonough-Beard, who teaches typing and physical education at Rosemont Junior High in La Crescenta, was no different at first.

“This was starting from scratch for me,” she said. “It’s so much different than the discus or any other event. For a while, I landed on my butt or my hands or even on my head every time I threw it. The ball would go this way or that way . . . every single possible direction.”

The event, as Diller indicated, is brimming with danger. Not only does the great force required to throw the ball cause scores of pulled-muscle-type injuries, but the steel ball is just as lethal as one fired from a cannon. Several years ago, a track and field writer from Bakersfield was killed during a meet at Cal State Los Angeles when an errant ball thrown during the competition struck him in the head.

The danger is present during each of McDonough-Beard’s workouts because she must share the field and the three-sided metal throwing cage with several men. For after you throw your hammer, you must go and retrieve it. And while you are doing this, other throwers continue to throw.

On a recent dark and overcast day at the Occidental field, a hammer ball occasionally would come within a few feet of another thrower. McDonough-Beard and the others were cautious about it but did not appear overly concerned, casually leaning one way or the other as a ball roared down beside them.

There were no other women at that day’s workout. McDonough-Beard said there seldom are at her workouts. It is, she offers, still largely an activity for men.

“That’s the only discouraging aspect of it,” she said. “At meets, sometimes promoters announce that there will be a women’s hammer event, but when I get there, most often, I’m told there won’t be one. ‘Throw with the men’ is what I hear most of the time.”

Next week, McDonough-Beard will put the hammer down for a while and travel to Minnesota, where she will compete in the U. S. Weightlifting Federation national championships in the 75-kilometer class. The top four in each weight class earn a berth in the 1991 Olympic Festival in Los Angeles.

But weightlifting is no longer an end, McDonough-Beard said. It is a means.

“It keeps me strong for the hammer,” she said. “That will always be No. 1.”