High Jumper to Put His Knee to the Test : Track and field: Former Olympian Doug Nordquist injured the joint in a pickup basketball game. With two weeks until tryouts for the U.S. team, he is unsure of his chances.

The athletic future of Doug Nordquist may ride on his left knee. The knee with a two-inch purple scar.

A world-class high jumper who has won two national titles, Nordquist finished fifth at the 1984 Olympics with a jump of 7 feet 6.

But a freak accident in a pickup basketball game nearly ended his career in November. Three surgeries later, the Santa Fe High band director can only finger that scar and wonder if he is ready for the Olympic Trials June 26-28 in New Orleans.

One last chance. That’s all Nordquist asks of his reconstructed knee.

Since the accident, Nordquist has cleared only 6-11 3/4. The timing that helped him win medals has not returned. And last weekend at a tuneup meet in Oregon, Nordquist felt a twinge in the back of the knee and didn’t push it, something he will have to do at the Trials if he hopes to leap the 7-4 or so necessary to qualify for the Olympic team.

“Subconsciously, I’m afraid to put the (left) foot down and really push off of it,” he said.

That wasn’t the case Nov. 5, when the 6-5 Nordquist took on a group of band students in the Santa Fe gym.

“A lane just opened up and I went through it to the basket,” he said. He made a thunderous dunk that drew oohs and ahs from students.

The next thing he remembers is lying in a heap on the hardwood, his left knee throbbing with pain.

“I was on the basketball floor knowing how bad it was, but hoping it wasn’t,” he said.

A short time later, the phone rang in the office of Allan Hanckel, Nordquist’s coach. Nordquist wanted a quick assessment of his situation. Hanckel didn’t mince words.

“It’s a career-ending injury,” he said.

Medical imaging tests indicated that Nordquist had sustained five injuries when he hit the floor, including a tiny fracture of the femur. Arthroscopic surgery revealed that it wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t good, either: He had four injuries.

On Nov. 29, a second surgery replaced the ligament that keeps the knee stable with a tendon from a cadaver.

A surgical staple inserted during that surgery was removed in mid-February because it was restricting his hamstring muscle.

A frustrated Nordquist made a vow as he was being wheeled into the operating room the third time.

“I was laying on that gurney and I told myself that I’m going to be jumping in 15 weeks,” he said. He was back in 14.

Hanckel says Nordquist has regained 95% of his jumping capacity. In early May, Nordquist went over the bar at 6-8 at an all-comers meet at Cal State Long Beach.

“His biggest roadblock is apprehension,” Hanckel said. “Physically, he’s probably 10 times ahead of where doctors thought he would be.”

Nordquist’s emotions ranged from fear to frustration during the eight-month ordeal. But he wasn’t angry, he said.

“I was scared, more than anything, of not being able to get back to where I was, where I had been,” he said.

Bands and music were Nordquist’s first loves. But after watching Dwight Stones on television win a bronze medal at the 1972 Olympic Games, Nordquist was inspired to begin high jumping.

In the mid-1970s at Sonora High in La Habra, he was better-known as a drum major. Tall and skinny, he was the butt of jokes. One classmate said Nordquist resembled “a giant Q-Tip.”

In 1978 at Fullerton College, Nordquist silenced his critics by winning the state community college high-jump title. He spurned an offer from UCLA and jumped instead at Washington State. He became the band director at Santa Fe in Santa Fe Springs in 1982.

In 1984, at 26, he burst out of the shadows of all-comers meets with a second-place finish at the Olympic Trials. The man who beat Nordquist was his inspiration, Dwight Stones.

In 1986, his finest year, Nordquist won high jump contests at The Athletics Congress championships, Goodwill Games and the Olympic Festival.

He was ranked No. 3 in the world entering 1987 but had a series of nagging injuries. He won the silver medal at the Olympic Festival that year, but he failed to qualify for the World Championships in Rome.

In 1988, after finishing fifth at the Olympic Trials, Nordquist announced his retirement.

“I was very, very disappointed and decimated by it,” he said. “I had concentrated so much on what I was going to do after I made the team that, when I didn’t make it, I didn’t know how to handle it.”

But less than two years later, the surprise of the 1984 Olympics was back at it again. In June of 1990, he jumped 7-8 1/2 at the Irvine Elite Track and Field Classic. A week later he jumped a personal best 7-8 3/4 at the national championships held at Cerritos College.

In 1991, he finished second at the Olympic Festival with a leap of 7-5 1/4, losing to longtime rival Leo Williams of Fresno on total jumps. Nordquist was looking forward to continuing his comeback this season when he hurt his knee.

But Hanckel says Nordquist is a “big meet” jumper. He points out that only weeks before the 1990 Irvine meet, the best Nordquist could clear was 7-1.

And because of the injury, Nordquist only had four months to train. “Theoretically, you can get to a peak,” he said. “But it’s a very short window of opportunity, a short period of time.”

Still, Fullerton College Coach Jim Kiefer, a longtime friend and coach, and Hanckel say Nordquist has the potential to buck the odds.

“He has a great work ethic,” Kiefer said, “And there is great balance in his life. I’ve always felt good that, if it didn’t work out jumping for him, that he’d be just fine.”

If the knee holds out--and only Nordquist will be able to tell that when he steps up to the bar in New Orleans--there’s a good possibility that the band director might qualify for one of the three Olympic spots.

“In 1984, I was a surprise,” he said of his sudden rise from obscurity to make the Olympic team. “Maybe I can be a surprise one more time.”