Long Jump Has Become Soar Subject

In track and field lore, The Jump is always thought of as the incredible soar through the air by Bob Beamon at Mexico City in 1968, the only long jump in history farther than 29 feet 2 inches.

But for long jumper Mike Powell, The Jump was no 29-footer. In fact, it was barely farther than 27 feet--27-5 1/4. And Powell didn’t jump into history. He jumped onto the U.S. Olympic team, though. One thing at a time.

It wasn’t even a very pretty jump. Few of Powell’s are. He seems to go through the air with all the grace and dignity of a guy being thrown out of a bar. His arms flail, his feet pedal. He lands in a heap, like a piano that has fallen off its hoist.

Carl Lewis, Larry Myricks, they go through the air like swans. They don’t even get their hair mussed. Powell crash-lands as if he has been hit by flak in mid-air. He goes through the air like one of Joe Kapp’s passes or a blocked field goal try.

That afternoon at Indianapolis, he was even less formful than usual. He was coming off an appendectomy and the Olympic trials could not have come up at a less advantageous moment. He was down to his last jump. Lewis and Myricks were safely on the Olympic team. Carl had a 28-9 jump and Myricks a 28-8 1/4, but Mike had to beat 27-3 1/4 just to gain the third and last place on the team.

He was in seventh place at the time with three fouls, one run-through and a best mark of only 26-5.

“If you miss this, no one’s ever going to even have heard of you,” he remembers telling himself.

He gathered himself up, chicken-scratched over the board well before the takeoff and hit the air.

“It was an ugly approach, it was an ugly run-up, it was an ugly jump,” he says. “I landed sideways. But I heard the crowd yell. I saw the mark go up, 8.36 meters--27-5 1/4. I had made the team! That was the greatest moment of my life.”

Some people take home a tape of “Casablanca” to pop into the video cassette machine for an evening’s entertainment. Mike Powell slips in the recording of his Indianapolis jump. To him, it’s a combination of “Gone With the Wind,” the flubber pictures and every John Wayne movie ever made.

But the real shocker was Seoul. Powell might have been the most overlooked story of the 1988 Olympics. Some people mixed him up with the discus thrower of the same surname. Others didn’t mix him up with anyone. They didn’t know who he was and didn’t care.

The long jump was supposed to be less a contest than a showcase for the great Carl Lewis. The Soviet, Robert Emmiyan, who had putatively gone over 29 feet at high altitude, was what Winston Churchill once called the whole Soviet Union, an enigma.

But when the jump started, Emmiyan was gone. A groin pull prevented him from even getting airborne.

That seemed to leave the field to Lewis and Myricks, who had finished fewer than an inch apart at Indianapolis. No one paid much attention to Mike Powell, including Mike Powell.

“I tried to tell myself it was just another track meet, but then I got out there in front of 80,000 people and all those TV cameras and my knees started shaking and I thought ‘Holy smoke, this is the Olympics!’ ”

He barely cleared 25 feet. He came into the pit like a rag doll. He felt he had to make 26 feet just to qualify.

“It was Indianapolis all over again,” he says. “I was down to my last jump.”

He jumped 27-4 1/4, which made him the top qualifier--canny old Lewis conserved his leaps for the finals and weighed in with a 26-6 1/2. Powell was ecstatic.

“I could hardly sleep,” he recalls. “I’m on Cloud 9. I thought, ‘Boy! I’m going to get a medal! The bronze medal!”

He was wrong. He was going to get a silver medal. On his third jump in the finals, Mike fluttered through the air to a 27-10 1/4 personal best for second place and the Olympic silver medal. Myricks came up almost a foot short.

All over Seoul, television commentators scrambled to find out who the upstart was who had come between Lewis and Myricks and upset the form so startlingly.

Michael Anthony Powell is a sunny, chatty 25-year-old from West Covina who could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a long jumper, a triple jumper, high jumper, a relay runner or just a cheer leader.

You get a pretty good fix on Mike when you know he trained and studied under, first, Dwight Stones, and then Willie Banks, two of the foremost larynxes of our times. Not surprisingly, Mike is outgoing, loquacious and quite apt to approach the crowd to get them to pick up the tempo of their vocal support when he gets to the top of the runway.

Powell, who will jump in the Times/Eagle Indoor Games at the Forum Friday night against Myricks and a cast of nine, hopes to polish up his airfoil this year so he looks less like a shot duck and more like a shot bullet coming into the pit. He would like to become the fifth in history to break 28 feet.

First, he has to spruce up his diet.

“I eat anything the dog will eat,” he admits. “And wash it down with a beer.”

Once he gets off the french fries, pizza with everything and cherry Cokes, Mike thinks he might even be the one to beat The Jump--the real one, Beamon’s.

“If I can get this far on my technique,” he warns, “no telling what I might do if I get smooth.”

Of course, Rocky Marciano never looked too smooth, either. Neither did Paavo Nurmi. Mike might be one of those people who, if he gets too smooth, might not be able to jump a crack in the sidewalk. Although he’d look good trying.