Sport: The Goose Flies High

Sizing up prospects for the Olympics in Rome next August, nearly everyone agrees that the U.S. has the world's best pole vaulters—and that the highest-flying U.S. vaulters are Veterans Bob Gutowski, 24, who holds the outdoor record of 15 ft. 8½ in., and Don Bragg, 24, who claims the indoor record of 15 ft. 9½ in. But last week in Norman, Okla., a relative unknown vaulted as high as anyone else in track history: John David Martin, 20, a University of Oklahoma junior, cleared the bar at 15 ft. 9¼ in.

A strapping (6 ft. 4 in.) Oklahoma farm boy with huge hands (his nickname is "Goose," after onetime Harlem Globetrotter Goose Tatum, who could make a basketball look like a BB shot in his vast paws), Martin began pole vaulting on a dare. Challenged by seventh-grade friends to enter the event in a school meet, Martin did—"and I was terrible." Humiliated, he walked into the woods, cut down a young locust tree and, using it as a pole, began practicing.

Although Martin's vault last week equaled the highest ever recorded,* it probably will not be recognized as a world record. To keep it from blowing down in the face of a stiff wind, the crossbar was placed on the vaulter's side of one of the upright standards—thereby making it just a bit more difficult to brush off. But the vault was still enough to serve warning to Olympians that the U.S., in addition to Gutowski and Bragg, has its high-flying Goose.