Congratulations to the dunces at the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. Bravo, you finally got around to accepting L. Jay Silvester into your ranks.
It's about time. Was it something he said? Something he didn't say? Did he forget to shake someone's hand or make small talk at a party somewhere? Did he offend someone somewhere along the way?At least you came to your senses while he can still walk. At least you did the right thing while he's still alive.
Silvester, who practically invented modern discus throwing and was a fixture in the Olympic Games, is 61 years old. He will be inducted into the Hall next month in Orlando with hurdler Greg Foster (40 years old), distance runner Francie Larrieu-Smith (45) and high jumper Dwight Stones (44). Two of them retired within the past six years. Silvester quit serious competition 22 years ago.
There's something wrong with this picture.
"I'm pleased that this finally happened," says Silvester, a professor and coach at BYU. "It's bittersweet, but it's nice. It's the same feeling I had when I finally got my Olympic medal. I'm content. It finally happened, even though I wonder why it didn't happen earlier."
Silvester believes there was a conspiracy to keep him out of the Hall. What other explanation could there be? He set five world records from 1961 to 1971. He won six national championships. He competed in four Olympic Games. He won an Olympic silver medal in 1972 and came within one last throw of gold.
Silvester was a pioneer. He raised the world record a preposterous 32 feet, from 198 feet to 230, in 10 years. He discovered a unique throwing style in his father's cow pasture in Tremonton that revolutionized the sport and was widely copied. It was as if he discovered the jump shot.
This was the man they kept out of the Hall of Fame for 22 years.
"I used to wonder if it was because I didn't win the gold medal," says Silvester. But none of his fellow inductees won gold either (one of them didn't even medal).
Three times he was nominated for the Hall of Fame. Three times he was ignored. The nominations are sent to a secret committee. "No one knows who they are," says Silvester. "They won't tell people who they are." The committee decides who will be voted on by another committee for induction. Silvester's name never even made it out of the committee to be voted on.
"I don't think it's on merit," he says. "I always felt there was a collusion against getting me in. It has to be a political thing."
For decades he has watched his peers inducted to the Hall of Fame. He has watched the next generation gain induction. He attended a couple of the ceremonies in Orlando himself, and stood there in the audience wondering if he would ever stand up there.
"There was certainly the possibility that it would never happen," he says.
If someone sought revenge, they got a good measure of it. Silvester noticed the slight. Perhaps he offended someone. Who knows. "I have no idea," he says. Maybe he rubbed someone wrong with his intense, serious demeanor. He always took himself and his sport seriously. He was not one for idle chit chat. He was too focused for that.
Silvester devoted the best years of his life to throwing a four-pound steel and wood disc from an eight-foot circle farther than any man ever. It was his obsession. Even on family vacations he might send the family off to Disneyland and go find an empty high school field on which to throw the discus. Big, strong, athletic and fast, he was a natural football player, but he quit the sport at Utah State to throw the shot and discus for the Aggies.
"It's a shame to waste all of that man on a little old iron ball and a wooden disc," football coach John Ralston once said.
But that was Silvester's love. "I see all of man the same," he said years ago, by way of explanation. "Each has to find something to spend his energy against, to struggle against, to excel in. Some things just catch our fancy, they become us, we become them, we become attached to an endeavor. There is an internal force that drives you to do that thing, and it becomes an addiction."
Like most addictions, it brought heartbreak. He was declared ineligible as a college senior for competing as a freshman, probably costing him a national title (he was second the previous year). He finished fourth in the U.S. Olympic Trials, one place from making the team.
He had set two world records heading into the 1964 Olympic Games, but, walking through the tunnels under the stadium before the competition - tunnels made for shorter Japanese people - the 6-foot-3 Silvester struck his head on a heating duct. With blood running down his face, he walked to the training room and then fainted as doctors stitched his head. He finished fourth, one out of a medal.
He was the favorite to win the gold medal in the 1968 Games after winning 22 straight competitions, smashing the world record three times and winning the Olympic Trials by a rout. He was so good that rivals were studying film and photos of his technique. He finished fifth. His last three throws were fouls. He once called those Olympics "the most painful experience of my life."
In the end it took four Olympics before Silvester could manage his nerves at that level. It was his only real flaw. He finally got his Olympic medal in 1972 after more than a decade of striving for it, but even that was disappointing. A Czech thrower passed him with his final throw.
"A lot of things have come late in my life," he said this week of his Hall induction. "I didn't even get to my first Olympics until I was 27."
And so perhaps it is only fitting he should wait again these two decades to gain his rightful induction into the Hall of Fame. He will finally go to Orlando and get his due. "I'll be there with the young guns," he says.