He Has a Shot to Win the Gold

The track meet used to be as indigenous to L.A. and Southern California as the surfboard or the SigAlert. The Coliseum used to attract bigger crowds to its track meets than the Rams. The Compton Relays sold out. The world’s best athletes showed their form here on the way to the Olympic Games. This saw Jesse Owens, Charlie Paddock, Carl Lewis, Wilma Rudolph before they became world figures.

So it gives me great pleasure to announce the L.A. Invitational track meet is back and will feature the world’s best track-and-fielders on their way to the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

And among those at the Sports Arena on Feb. 7 will be John Godina. You look at John Godina and you know he makes his living outdoors. Probably on the Green Bay Packers, you figure. All that bulk and muscle. Not an ounce of fat.

He probably could have been opening holes in a Super Bowl, but Godina likes to work alone, not in a chorus.

Besides, you usually don’t get a concussion from a discus. The shot can’t chop block you. And they don’t double-team you.

So Godina quit football early in his career at Cheyenne, Wyo., and gave up the facemasks and helmet and pads for the discus and shot. It didn’t hurt that Dad was a state champion in the discus at Montana.

Putting the shot was as American as the hot fudge sundae. The jack-o’-lantern. Of the first 10 Olympics, the United States won the shotput in nine. Of the first 17, we won 15. Of the last seven Olympics, we have won only two.

There is some notion the Europeans who won of late are not better athletes, just better experiments. That their abilities come not from nature but from a test tube. That they are sometimes creations of latter-day Dr. Frankensteins. If you look closely you can see the bolts sticking out of their foreheads or the sparks coming out of their ears.

Godina himself is quick to notice some of his foreign challengers compete only a few meets a year, usually where the supervisorial testing is minimal or nonexistent.

Shotputters often double in the discus--they employ essentially the same muscles and skills--but John was the first American athlete in 72 years to qualify for the Olympics in both the shot and discus. He medaled (silver) in the shot but was ill for the discus at Atlanta.

No one knows how the shotput came to be a track event. It was probably the forerunner of the cannonball and the Greeks used it to smash fortifications.

For a time, it was also a two-handed sport till it resolved into the one-handed, 16-pound toss of today.

Parry O’Brien probably dragged it into the spotlight. Parry used to dramatize the event by coming into the 7-foot shotput circle like a walk-on by Marilyn Monroe, or a burlesque stripper, peeling off his layers of clothing and toweling as he approached, and he strode around growling, the shot looking like a grape in his massive paw. Before O’Brien, the putter just stood stock still in the circle summoning up strength till he felt ready and then just jetted the iron ball straight out from his shoulder with a ponderous grunt and sent it on a line 35 to 45 feet like a bullet pass.

O’Brien was the first to experiment with pivoting in the circle to bring centrifugal force into the equation and soon was winning two gold medals and one silver and becoming the first to go over 60 feet.

He dramatized the sport by denigrating rivals years before Muhammad Ali thought to put it in his act, and he once referred to a competitor, Bill Nieder, as “a cow pasture performer who does his best throwing before an audience of goats.” Nieder was so mad he beat O’Brien for the Olympic gold in 1960 but everyone noticed the stands were full in Rome that day.

John Godina doesn’t feel the need to demean rivals other than to note they skip some of the closely monitored meets. Otherwise, he simply beats them with a smile.

He may be our best hope in two events at Sydney in 2000. The discus, which was once almost as American as the shotput, has been won only once in the seven Olympic years since Al Oerter won four in a row for the U.S., starting in 1956.

But the road to Sydney and the millennium Olympics once again runs through L.A., and at the Sports Arena Godina will join the flower of American track-and-fielders in the 38th L.A. Invitational, kickoff event on the road to the gold.

As the two-time world champion and the reigning silver medalist in the shot, John will be the world target in his event. At 6 feet 4, 285 pounds, he will be a big target. Europeans see this as a strength sport and their birthright. Godina sees it as a speed-cum-technique sport and it comes in red, white and blue. And he hopes the Aussies have the sheet music to the Star Spangled Banner. He plans to ensure they’ll need it. A lot.