The Olympic winner who didn't get to be Tarzan

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/brag ... 6-pole-new

The Olympic winner who didn't get to be Tarzan
Securing a Gold Medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics was one of the defining moments of Don Bragg's life journey that has had its ups and downs.
By VIK JOLLY and LOIS EVEZICH
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Comments 0 | Recommend 1
Before in '56 I tried to score, but failed.
And again in '60 by myself I tried once more …
Only winning gave me royal grace
Forever securing my golden place
A torn right leg muscle kept Don "Tarzan" Bragg from making the 1956 Olympics U.S. pole vault squad.
But it didn't crush the 21-year-old's Olympic dream, fueled by a carpenter father who built a pole vault pit in the family's back yard to help his son excel in sports.
A dream that took shape in the outdoors, swinging from tree vines and ropes and using bamboo poles discarded by a rug store in his south New Jersey neighborhood to launch himself over clothes lines, creeks and ditches.
A dream one day to be like his hero, Tarzan, the barrel-chested fictional ape man, who loomed large in a kid's life; strong and king of the jungle.
This dream would carry Bragg four years later to the Olympic podium in Rome, earning him a gold medal for vaulting over 15 feet 5 inches, an Olympic record that still holds because he was one of the last to use a metal pole. (Since the 1960s, pole vaulters have used fiberglass poles, flexible and lighter in weight.)
Bragg charged up with pole in hand in the 95-degree heat, after eight hours of grueling competition that knocked his weight down from a strapping 198 pounds to 187, and went airborne. He feared that his cotton shirt, weighed down by sweat and pins that held up his number against his chest, might tip the cross bar.
As he seemed to fly and then, upon landing, he lay on his back, his eyes fixed on the bar, worried that vibration from the roar of the 50,000 people still in the stands at Rome's Stadio Olimpico might dislodge the beam.
For Bragg, the moment froze in time.
•••
Across the Atlantic, over the Delaware River, not too far from his hometown of Penns Grove, N.J., in the two 11-story DuPont Nemours buildings, the PA system crackled with the voice of a commentator.
Blood drained out of a young Theresa Fiore's body.
Only months earlier the blonde beauty had dashed onto the field and into the arms of Bragg after he made the pole vault team at the U.S. Olympic trails in Palo Alto. The image of the couple, together, became an instant icon, landing on the front pages of newspapers around the country.
On that Olympic victory day, his hometown sweetheart was on the telephone with a reporter in New York. The newsman patched Fiore through to a fellow reporter in Rome, who was witnessing Bragg's vault. Fiore's bosses at DuPont, where she worked as a secretary, allowed the call to be heard throughout the office.
"He's up, he's over… He's just won the gold medal."
The Delaware office, like the crowd in Rome, erupted in jubilation.
Fiore dropped the telephone and wept. She and Bragg had had a long courtship and she remembered him saying that the gold would go on her finger after the Olympic gold went around his neck.
"I figured if he didn't make it, this might be over and done with," she said of the relationship, laughing.
Back in Rome, Bragg wasn't finished.
"The vault is not done until you walk out of the pit," he says.
That muggy summer night, Bragg walked out of the pit and into Olympic history, followed soon after with more than 45 years of matrimony.
But Bragg's journey was just starting, and not every step would be as graceful.
His post-Olympic life has been a testament to the fact that life doesn't necessarily get easier after you join the pantheon of Olympic champions. No one cheers from the sidelines in most of life's battles, usually fought alone.
New challenges, perhaps even greater than ones he faced in the sporting arena, still awaited the champ and turned him inward. He would eventually find catharsis and set his emotions free in many poems he penned in the late 1970s.
Through the poetry emerges a portrait of a man at times roiled by pain and even in fear of the end of life. Yet Bragg's words speak of challenging oneself to succeed, of climbing the next peak.
I had a son who did not run
He never played a game …
I had a son who shortly died
He never had a name.
•••
Bragg, as a recent Olympian, was set to play the lead in the next Tarzan movie, following Johnny Weismuller, also an Olympic gold medalist. But the project was stalled by litigation. When Hollywood called again, a few years later, Bragg had 18 stitches on his foot because of a fall while vaulting.
Then a state employee, Bragg turned his attention to "Kamp Olympik," also the title of a new book he has just published. The camp was Bragg's effort to help inner-city kids have the outdoor experiences that he'd loved as a boy.
A 400-acre property in pristine New Jersey pinelands opened in July 1967. Kamp Olympik was next to a river, with plenty of trees from which to swing, just like Tarzan.
The camp ended after an 11-year run and some 5,000 children having gone through its programs. The Braggs were at one of their lowest points in life, depleted and having lost their fifth child just hours after birth.
About the same time, Bragg lost his job as the athletics director at Stockton State College in New Jersey, a program he helped build. Lost too were properties he had bought as investments because they became part of environmental preservation areas due to changes in laws.
Everything in his life seemed to be collapsing.
Bragg turned to poetry.
… We shudder when it does appear
The feeling of combat we know is near.
Yet if we could tally all
We have risen more than we did fall.
Over time, the Olympic couple got back on their feet. Today, Bragg talks excitedly about his latest book and hopes of turning it into a movie script.
As during previous Olympics, the Beijing games have revived old memories, helping Bragg relive his triumphant pole vault. The old Tarzan in him still lives.
"You know what, we could do a movie called 'Son of Tarzan' and I could play his father," Bragg says.
It's a dream, he says. He laughs hard.
The man in a still gladiator-like body has gone through six heart bypass surgeries, an operation on his spine from all the banging he took from falls on his back. Welts and lumps on his legs are still visible.
He gets motivated – like Beijing gold medalist Michael Phelps was recently by the words of the French swim team that said it would crush the Americans – when someone tells him something can't be done.
The Russians made the same error back in 1960, saying that Bragg would be next to fall to them after U.S. high jumper John Thomas. That's all the push Bragg needed to achieve Olympic glory.
Bragg can be reached at tarzanbragg@aol.com