Thanks to these three they decree Dick Booth an S.O.B.
"They" are the University of Arkansas field event coach's coaching peers.
These three are Booth-mentored Razorback senior-to-be high jumper Kenny Evans of Pine Bluff and former Razorback horizontal jumpers Robert Howard and Melvin Lister. At last month's U.S. Olympic Trials in Sacramento, Calif., that trio qualified to join U.S. Olympic jumps coach Booth on the U.S. team headed for the Games in September at Sydney, Australia.
"My fellow Olympic coaches wore me out," Booth said, smiling. Œ"Booth, you S.O.B, how did you get three in?' Two winners and a second and the second was second to the Olympic champion."
Howard, a Razorback senior in 1998 and recently accepted to the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock, won the Trials triple jump at 55-9.
Lister, just completing his UA career in June as a senior at the NCAA Outdoor Championships, won the Trials long jump at 27-3 3-4.
Evans was one of three behind Charles Austin's 7-7 1-2 to clear 7-5 1-4. Kenny got second on fewer misses.
Booth says the three got in the old fashioned way. They earned it.
"Kenny is the one who really grew up," Booth said. "Towards the end of the season he realized he was close to doing some special things. It's like a light bulb went off. Instead of just looking at me, grinning and shaking his head, it was like, ŒI got you. I've got to lift weights really hard and do extra this or extra that.' And he's done it. Kenny has kept it at a high level. He feels like he can jump 7-5, 7-6 on a whim. Kenny and Melvin took it to heart knowing they would have to at least be as good or better than they've ever been and they gave themselves a chance."
Evans, University of South Carolina 110-meter hurdler Terrence Trammell and Stanford 1,500-meter runners Gabe Jennings and Michael Stember are the only 2000 Olympiad athletes who competed at the NCAA meet with more NCAA eligibility remaining, Booth said.
Another with first-time NCAA eligibility forthcoming, triple jumper-long jumper Walter Davis of Barton County (Kan.) Junior College, also made the U.S. team.
Booth wasn't singing Lister's work ethic praises the first couple of weeks after Melvin completed his senior eligibility at the NCAA Outdoor Championships.
"For a week Melvin fell away from it with agents and shoe companies and sponsorships," Booth said. "But he realized, ŒI've got to get with it' and he did. Razorbacks take care of business at the right time."
Lister is part of just a handful of departing collegians to make the Olympic team, Booth said.
Nobody ever doubts Howard's work ethic.
Robert has come from a year and half rehab from Achilles tendon injuries that would have terminated the track career's of most, especially in a pounding event like the triple jump.
Howard's injury made him the longest shot of the three to be an Olympian when the outdoor season began last March.
"This spring you wouldn't have given him a snowball's chance," Arkansas Head Coach John McDonnell said of Howard. "But that's heart."
He'd been there before as a 1996 U.S. Olympian and his heart beat to return.
This marks Lister's first Olympics but he had cause to be confident. After all, Lister's 27-10 1-4 that won the SEC Outdoor last May ranked best in the world for much of the season and even now is No. 2 only to Cuba's 28-foot-plus jumper Ivan Pedroso.
So Evans ranked as the longest shot, third place at the NCAA Outdoor and now in a field of such post collegians as Austin and former Razorback Matt Hemingway, a nationally indoor leading 7-9.
Evans's personal best (7-7 for second at the NCAA Indoor last March) doesn't measure up to the personal bests that jumped at Sacramento. That didn't faze Arkansas' coolest cucumber. None could have felt any better about negotiating those 7-3 1-2 and 7-4 1-2 early heights without accumulating several misses. More misses hit hard when several tie at the same height.
Just ask Weber State's Charles Clinger, the odd man out behind Austin, Evans and Nathan Leeper for the three Olympic berths though he cleared the same 7-5 1-4 that Kenny and Leeper leaped.
"There were people with a lot better PRs," Evans said. "But I don't know if anybody was more confident because I don't know how consistent they had been. When I cleared 7-5 1-2 on my first attempt while other guys were missing, I knew I was going to make the team."
So while his 7-5 1-4 at the Trials surpasses by just a quarter of an inch his prep best as a Pine Bluff Zebra, Evans said his consistency soars him way above his high school days.
Kenny has now jumped in six NCAA Championships indoors and outdoors and made All-American every time. He won Indoors as a freshman and has been up there battling Mark Boswell, the Canadian born Texas Longhorn, ever since.
"I've been more consistent than I've ever been," Evans said of his 2000 season. "Before the SEC Outdoor I hadn't jumped less than 7-4 1-4. I jumped 7-3 there and 7-4 1-4 in the rain at nationals."
Is it mind-boggling, reviewing his course from Pine Bluff to Sydney?
"Everybody has been real supportive back in Pine Bluff," Evans said. "They had some great newspaper articles there. So I am glad that everything worked out. I don't know if we've ever had an Olympic athlete from Pine Bluff. So I'm just happy to represent my little, old home town. Hopefully I can make the final and be in the medal hunt. We'll see."
Lister had that great 27-10 leap yet could have gone timidly to the Trials. His 26-0 at the NCAA Outdoor Championships only got fifth in the event he was highly favored to win, though he did rebound to be the slight underdog who won the NCAA triple jump. Then at Portland, Ore. he long jumped an abysmal 25-6 in his lone post-collegiate meet prior to the Trials.
Did he fret?
"I felt real confident," Lister insisted. "I felt I was the best jumper out there, the best jumper America had to offer. I don't know if anybody else felt that way but I don't need anybody else to feel that way but me. These were guys I competed against all year. You know what kind of person they are and what stops them from jumping good. I knew if I put a big jump out there and got loud and started talking bad, that a lot of them would start pressing and trying too hard. "
Maybe he was the one who had tried too hard in that first post-collegiate meet.
"I think it was a little out of college jitters," Lister said. "It was my first meet that I didn't wear a University of Arkansas uniform. I didn't have a coach there to help me. I felt flat, like I wasn't getting up in the air and getting down the runway fast enough. My coach wasn't there and there were a lot of things I just wasn't used to.
Money is everything now. And when you throw money into the picture, it creates problems."
Howard commiserated.
"In college," Howard said, "track is fun and you enjoy it. But when you get out, if you don't do well, you don't get into meets. And if you don't get into meets, you don't eat. In the outside world, that memory of what you've done in track and field is really, really short."
Well, not completely.
John Chaplin, the U.S. Olympic head coach, saw Lister blistering on the leadoff leg of Arkansas' 4 x 400 relay that won its prelim in a then NCAA leading 3:02.02 at Durham.
Chaplin immediately asserted if Lister made the U.S. team as a jumper Melvin might jump into the 4 x 400 relay.
Apparently that still holds.
"John Chaplin said I was going to be in his pool of eight for the 4 x 400," Lister said. "That there would be a real strong possibility that I would run it in one of the qualifying rounds."
Lister might have joined Howard in the Olympic triple jump had he tripled jumped at the Trials. Melvin's 55-7 3-4 that won the NCAA Outdoor would have ranked second to Howard's 55-9 in Sacramento.
"My hamstring was kind of bothering me and that would have been a bad decision even if I had won," Lister said of the what-ifs of the triple jump at the Trials. "I could have injured it where I go to the Olympic Games and long jump 25 feet and triple jump 53 feet. That's not worth it to me."
Howard has since turned down a chance to long jump at the Olympics.
Walter Davis, third to Howard's fourth in the Olympic long jump and second to Howard's first at the Trials in the triple, scratched from the long jump to concentrate on the triple jump in Sydney.
Howard did likewise allowing graduating Ole Miss senior Savante Stringfellow to be the third U.S. long jumper.
Robert raged at Sacramento when a long jump he said went around 26-11, good for second to Lister, got measured, or mismeasured, Howard believes, back to 26-5.
Howard tried to protest formally but the pit got raked so fast that his protest was futile.
So instead he protested informally, and loudly.
"I really got beside myself," Howard said. "I can't ever remember reacting like that. But when you are right there and that's the chance you have to be on the Olympic team, you aren't thinking what may happen two or three days later in the triple jump. I didn't curse the people, but I used words that penetrated the soul."
Booth said, "He looks he made the team, he doesn't, and he's devastated. So he regroups in the triple jump and wins the dang thing."
Howard said, "It might have been a blessing in disguise because I had to refocus."
He's refocused from tougher problems.
Try falling from being a four-time NCAA champion and an Olympian apparently med school bound who has met the girl of his dreams to becoming a bone-spurred, track cripple, not accepted yet to med school and too troubled to abide the dream girl because his other dreams are slipping away.
"You talk about mental stress," Howard said. "It strained my relationship with Jessica (the former Jessica Jackson). We got married last July 1 but back then we broke up for awhile. She was trying to get into dental school and I had applied to med school but hadn't gotten in yet. I wasn't jumping. Everything hit the bottom of the barrel. Everywhere I turned there were problems, but I always thought I would come back. And when it started going good, boom, it was a chain reaction. I got into medical school ( he'll start either in January or later at UAMS). My girl got into dental school (the University of Tennessee Dental School in Memphis). I asked her to marry me and she said, ŒYes.' I started training and jumping far. Everything went better."
It's all good for all three, and Booth sees no reason why it can't be even better in Sydney.
"I'm expecting them all," Booth asserted, "to be in the finals and having a go at it."
