To O’Brien, 10 Events Are Worth It

You look at Dan O’Brien and you know he couldn’t be anything but an athlete. The slim to nonexistent hips, the wasp-waist, the catlike walk, the eager eyes. You figure he could be a wide receiver, a cleanup hitter, a point guard, a heavyweight contender. Or, maybe he’s a sprinter, high hurdler, long jumper or high jumper.

O’Brien could have been all of the above. So, he settled for being most of the above. He became a decathlete.

He also could be the next Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was the man who inspired the ultimate accolade both for himself and the event when, in 1912, the King of Sweden hung a medal around his neck and blurted: “Sir, you are the world’s greatest athlete!�

Decathlon is otherwise an orphan event in the family of track and field. It comes front and center only every four years when it becomes a centerpiece gold medal. It is the toughest gold medal in the Olympics. You can get a gold medal in some sports by being one of 16 team members (field hockey), or 12 (basketball) or even a part of a relay squad.

You can get a gold medal for 9.9 seconds of work (100 meters) or for one jump or throw. Even the marathon is over in two hours.

The decathlete struggles for two grueling days. He uses different muscles for different events. He has skill events that call for meticulous technical performances and such ad-lib, just-do-it! events as the 100-meter and 400-meter dashes, the long jump and metric mile.

It is in some ways the track equivalent of being a catcher in baseball, the center or pulling guard in football, the sixth man in basketball. Your rewards are hardest earned.

You win multiple gold medals for doing the same thing over and over--swimming. You get one gold medal in decathlon for doing 10 different things. There are no butterfly events. Running has nothing to do with throwing the discus or putting the shot, which has nothing to do with vaulting with a pole, leaping into a sand pit or throwing a javelin.

You have to be a tremendous athlete. You also have to be part masochist. You come out of a decathlon about in the condition of a guy who has just crawled out of a train wreck or spent a week adrift at sea. You’re dehydrated, sometimes hallucinatory. I have never known an Olympic decathlete who could furnish a specimen for urinalysis in less than six hours after his last event.

Usually, a decathlete is a super-disciplined human being, the kind of guy who is prompt for appointments, in bed after sundown, either in class or on a track, as dependable as daylight and as steady in his habits as a monk.

Of course, none of these applied to the patron saint of the decathlon, the Sac and Fox Indian, Jim Thorpe. Jim was a man of such unsteady habits, he threw away careers in track, football and baseball. The world’s greatest athlete was one of the world’s greatest drinkers.

Dan O’Brien looked for a time as if his aim was to emulate Thorpe’s performance in more than the shotput ring or pole vault runway. Dan’s thirst, like Thorpe’s, wasn’t only for success.

The son of an African-American father and a Finnish-American mother, neither of whom he ever knew--or wants to know--Dan was brought up by a Jim and Virginia O’Brien, a Klamath Falls, Ore., farm couple who augmented their own family of two with six racially mixed adopted children. Dan was one of them. He refers to them as his father and mother, the only ones he ever knew.

Dan was a one-man track team in high school, where he once won the 100, the 110 hurdles, the 400 and the long jump and finished second in the meet all by himself as a high school team.

But there was a limited market for decathletes, and Dan accepted a scholarship at the University of Idaho.

He majored in pot and booze. His marks shriveled in track and were nonexistent in classrooms. He lost his scholarship, flunked out and finally was thrown out of his dorm by campus police.

“I stayed in Moscow (Ida.) that Christmas of ‘87, drinking and feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t that classwork was that hard for me. I just wasn’t motivated. I was alone and depressed on Christmas. I knew I had to get back in training or it was all over for me.�

His coaches were disgusted, too. “Get a broom!� they advised him cynically.

He actually sold bottled water and water softeners and, later, made wood-burning stoves in Moscow, but it was his college coach, Mike Keller, who hated to see the potential go to waste, who came to the rescue. He helped his young athlete get into junior college and bring his grades up to levels where he could re-enroll at the university.

O’Brien was good enough to win a Santa Barbara pre-Olympic trial meet in ‘88, but a hamstring undermined him at the ’88 Olympic trials in Indianapolis.

“I wasn’t ready really. I got by on speed, not technique,� he acknowledges.

A decathlon--100-meter dash, long jump, shotput, high jump and 400 meters the first day, and 110-meter hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1,500 the second day--requires a great deal of both. You are measured by how close you can come to a world record mark in each event. A score of 1,000 in each event would indicate near-perfection, but the decathlon tables are upgraded periodically to conform to world standards. Not only has no one scored 10,000, no one has scored 9,000. O’Brien hopes to be the first. Great Britain’s Daley Thompson holds the Olympic and world record of 8,847 points.

The decathlon, which used to be as American as pumpkin pie--the United States won nine of 16, including six in a row--has not gone to an American since Bruce Jenner in 1976.

But O’Brien has won The Athletics Congress meet and the world championships in the past year. And, now that his shoe contract with fellow decathlete Dave Johnson has relieved him of the necessity of making stoves or delivering bottles, he is taking dead aim on the trials in New Orleans and the Games in Barcelona.

History could repeat. A King (of Spain) could be hanging a medal around his neck on Aug. 5 and exclaiming “Sir, you are the world’s greatest athlete!� After that, it is hoped the new Jim Thorpe doesn’t end up like the old one.