TRACK & FIELD

Return of the Prodigy

The No. 1 mystery of U.S. sport is what makes a curve ball curve. No. 2 is the mercurial career of High Jumper John Thomas. A prodigy at 17, he was a world record holder at 18, a has-been at 19, and now, at 22, he is a sensation all over again. Last week, at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, while runners pounded around the board track and an off-key band blared I Could Have Danced All Night, Thomas effortlessly leaped 7 ft. 21 in. on his first try and broke the Millrose Games record of Russia's Valery Brumel. All the other jumpers had gone out long before; he did it, without competition, just for pride and practice.

"On My Own." Thomas would hardly recognize himself as the jittery, gangling teen-ager who once covered his ears with his hands to shut out the noise of the crowd. Relaxed and confident, he now strolls around the floor between jumps, chatting with other athletes, leaning over the seats to sign autographs. "I don't let anything bother me any more, especially the fans," he says. "I'm absent from them. I used to really believe that they were all my friends, but I soon found out that they liked me only because I was winning."

Thomas shrugs off his disappointing third place in the 1960 Olympics, the noisy boos that accompanied his nine losses to Brumel, his astonishing failure even to qualify for the U.S. team that went to Moscow last summer. "No body likes to lose," he says, "but there's no sense in letting it get you down. I've learned a lot in the last few years. I guess the learning process started when I got my first poison-pen letter. Once everything was given to me. Now I have to try to make it on my own."

What help he gets comes from a bespectacled Irishman, Tom Duffy, who first introduced Thomas to the high-jump bar nine years ago at Rindge Technical high school in Cambridge, Mass. "John was a little string bean," recalls Duffy. "He had decided he wanted to be a tennis player. I had to get that idea out of his head, and the only way I could do it was to take him out on the courts and lick him pretty good. Once that was done, he was ready to jump."

Now an assistant coach at Holy Cross, Duffy ran into Thomas by accident at the Harvard track, agreed last November to coach him on the side.

He watched Thomas jump in practice, was appalled by what he saw. The athlete who once held the world record at 7 ft. 3 3/4 in. could barely clear 6 ft. 8 in. "He was so far out of shape," says Duffy, "that one of my Holy Cross jumpers, a six-eight man at best, was beating him consistently." Almost at once, Duffy spotted a flaw in Thomas' motion. "John had picked up the bad habit of almost stopping and arching backward, right at the bar," he says. "He was losing all his spring that way."

Straight Up. To work off excess poundage, Duffy ordered regular doses of roadwork, weight lifting (25 squats with 250 Ibs.), wind sprints and calisthenics. To improve Thomas' coordination, he suggested ballet lessons, and John even wangled a scholarship to the Boston Conservatory of Music. In practice sessions, Duffy heckled Thomas unmercifully. "Come on, you're going to work, work, really work," he bellowed. "You've got that bar too low. Put it up to six-nine. You've got to go up straight, John, up straight. Don't let your leg stay up there so long. Pay attention now. Come on, I want to see a lot of daylight between you and that bar." Explained Duffy: "You have to talk tough to John. In high school, I used to make him cry."

The grown-up John Thomas never cries. He works for an orthopedic supply house, and he is the Boston representative for something called Niagara Cyclo-Massage machines. He collects jazz records, lives in a two-room basement apartment jammed with fur pelts, tribal masks and African sculpture ("the Congo Hilton," he calls it). "Now I'm going to see what life is really all about," he says. But first there is that Olympic gold medal he intends to win next fall in Tokyo. "It's between me and that bar," says Thomas, "and I'm not out to satisfy anybody but myself."

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