Joe Bennett: Of quadratic equations and my favourite high jumpers

In conventional styles of high jumping, as you’d expect, the body’s centre of gravity is heaved up and over the bar, with additional clearance to allow for the flesh surrounding it. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Name me a high jumper. I can do two. The first was Big Garry.

I sat behind Big Garry at school, in our alphabetically-by-surname classroom. As I did battle with a quadratic equation, if I sucked my pen and looked thoughtfully ahead of me, it was Garry’s jacket that filled my view in much the same way as Big Garry filled his jacket. For Big Garry was fat. But he was a nice kid, a kid who didn’t fight or shout or seek fame or do anything but get on respectably with getting on respectably. And, astonishingly, he could jump.

His great fan was Dave Duggan. Dave Duggan taught PE. He had a prognathous jaw that he was forever cradling and stroking. When he didn’t feel like teaching, he would make us run laps of the field, emerging from his PE office to announce how many laps remained, and as we wilted over the finish line, that would be that, the PE class over, time for a shower and a return to quadratic equations and the vista of Garry’s back.

Garry must have hated the running. He had so much soft flesh to lug around. But then each summer, briefly, the athletics gear would come out from its shed, and a track would be whitewashed on the grass and the high jump pit would be cleared of weeds and raked and little stands would be erected either side of it and a bar slung between them. And we would be lined up to jump over it. Or not. But the star of the show was Big Garry.

“My little fairy” was what Dave Duggan called him. “Come on, my little fairy,” he’d say, “show ‘em how it’s done” - and Big Garry would start towards the high jump bar. And as he went, he seemed somehow to rise onto tiptoe despite his bulk, despite the expanse of his shorts, despite the shuddering jelly of his breasts. He danced across the grass - I can see him now - and then, in defiance of his bulk, in defiance, it seemed, of the iron law of gravity, he would spring from the earth and pop neatly, lightly, beautifully over the bar. And Dave Duggan would grasp his prognathous jaw and grin and say, “Now that’s how it’s done.”

And we all liked it. It made us laugh, but kindly, laugh with the surprise of it, the odd contrarian neatness. There was a beauty to it.

The style of jump that Big Garry did, that we all did, was the scissors. You passed over the bar in a sitting position and landed on your feet. It was the amateur method. The professional method was the straddle which involved rolling around the bar, face down to the earth and it called for a softer landing than a school sand pit offered.

But then, suddenly, at the Olympics, sometime in the sixties, came my second high jumper, Dick Fosbury. He changed the high jump, instantaneously, thoroughly and forever. He didn’t straddle. He flopped.

At the last moment of his approach, Fosbury turned his back on the bar and, as his shoulders wrapped over it, his spine arced, a sort of ripple ran through his body, his legs flipped up, and over the bar he went. And you sensed immediately that somehow, though you could not define how this was better than all other methods, was the way ahead in high jumping. And so it has proved. Fosbury won gold and today every high jumper does the Fosbury Flop.

The beauty of it turned out to have an explanation in physics. In conventional styles of high jumping, as you’d expect, the body’s centre of gravity is heaved up and over the bar, with additional clearance to allow for the flesh surrounding it. But with the Flop, remarkably, the centre of gravity passes, at the moment of the body’s flip, from one side of the bar to the other without ever being raised above it. That is the trick of it. It is sleight of body. It is a form of magic.

I believe Big Garry became an engineer, as did Dick Fosbury, who died this year. But for me, what the two of them will always have in common - one of them fat as lard, the other skinny as a stick - is not the high jump, but delight through surprise. Momentarily they both lit and freshened the world by doing something that didn’t matter.