Word: beamon
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...more dissimilar Olympians would be hard to imagine. Al Oerter is 32 and white, a hulking 260-pounder who lives with his wife and two children on suburban Long Island and works as supervisor of the computer communications department at Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. Bob Beamon is 22, black and bearded, a gangling 160-lb. product of the streets of New York who attends the University of Texas at El Paso on a track scholarship-and says that he would rather be playing basketball. Last week in Mexico City, each in his own way demonstrated what the Olympic Games...
...Olympic long jump was supposed to be a two-man contest between the U.S.'s Ralph Boston and Russia's Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, coholders of the world record (27 ft. 4¾ in.). Beamon's unpolished jumping style made purists shudder and write off as a fluke his indoor world record of 27 ft. 2¾ in. last March. Sometimes he took off from his right foot, sometimes from his left. He often did not bother to count his strides on the approach. In the qualification trials, he fouled on his first two jumps and barely made...
...really. "I just jump," he says. Sprinting down the runway, he powers off the board, "windmilling" through the air until the last instant, when he extends his legs way out ahead of him-and sometimes plops right back down on his fanny, spoiling the jump. But most often Beamon defies gravity and thrusts himself forward. No one can explain quite how. Nor do track buffs understand much else that Beamon does. A 9.5-sec. sprinter in the 100, he races through his approach at a speed generally considered too tiring for an all-out jump. And Beamon is still deciding...
Love That Basketball. Son of a New York City shoemaker, Beamon only recently started concentrating on the long jump. True, he could jump better than 24 ft. when only a freshman at Jamaica High School in New York, but basketball was his love, he says. "I didn't have too much interest in track." All that changed at Texas when Coach Wayne Vandenburg got hold of him. As a freshman at the A.A.U. championships in Oakland last March, Beamon fouled on three of his four jumps. His one legal jump, though, was a full 15 in. better than...
...that he has the world indoor record, Beamon has his sights on the outdoor record of 27 ft. 4¾ in., held jointly by Boston and Ter-Ovanesyan. And why not? After all, Bob got off a fantastic 27-ft. 7½-in. jump at the N.C.A.A. championships, only to find that he had fouled by ½ in. Ultimately, he aims for a 28-ft. jump-the distance it may take to win in the Olympics. "I'm not in good shape yet," says he. "I haven't really started my training...