Thirty-four years ago, prior to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Bob Wood came up with an idea for a book.
Bob was (and is) a sports agent and former University of Utah distance runner. More importantly, he was (and is) a good friend of mine and fellow Deseret News columnist Doug Robinson.
By the early 1990s, Bob had represented a number of athletes who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the process, he had become something of a historian about Latter-day Saint athletes who had participated in the Olympic Games.
There were dozens of them, he said, but the accomplishments of many were not well known. Bear in mind, this was back in the dark ages of 30 years ago, before Wikipedia, before you could type in a keyword and have an encyclopedia appear on your screen. It was Bob’s fear that the stories of these Olympians were in danger of being lost in the cracks of history. “I always felt like that was an untouched part of our culture,” he said.
His idea in 1991 was to write a book about them.
“How many of them?” Doug and I asked.
“All of them,” he said.
Bob agreed to do the hard part: come up with the names of as many Mormon Olympians (that would be the book’s subtitle when it was published by Deseret Book in 1992) as he could find and sum up the basic details in the index at the back of the book.
For our part, Doug and I would pick 12 Olympians we felt deserved a chapter of their own.
We flipped a coin. I won. There were just two gold medalists on the list: gymnast Peter Vidmar from 1984 and Alma Richards from 1912.
Despite the fact I knew less than zero about him, I drafted Richards first.
Then I started my walk back through time, one that took me to Alma’s hometown of Parowan, to interviews with his relatives, to the library archives at BYU and the International Olympic Committee.
The story that unfolded was so much better than fiction that it almost seemed made up. It involved a Michigan State University professor who steered a young Alma back to school; a BYU coach named Timpanogos who thrust a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” in Alma’s hands when he put him on the train to the Olympic trials; an assist from legendary football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg that saved him from being left off the 1912 U.S. Olympic team roster; and, climactically, a midfield prayer in Stockholm, site of the 1912 Games, that Alma uttered, on his knees, in full view of the stands, prior to the leap that beat teammate Jim Thorpe, aka “The World’s Greatest Athlete,” and everyone else for the gold medal in the high jump.
I thought at the time, Someone should make this into a movie.
I bring it up now because someone has.
“Raising the Bar: The Alma Richards Story” was released this week in Utah theaters. Next week it will be released in Idaho and Arizona.
The movie is by veteran Utah filmmaker T.C. Christensen (director of “17 Miracles,” “Escape from Germany” and “The Penny Promise,” among many others).
When I sat down to see the film at its premiere at the Megaplex in South Jordan, it was admittedly with some trepidation. I’d always wanted to see somebody do this movie, as long as they did it right.
Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. T.C. Christensen has long carried the Alma Richards story a lot closer to his heart than I ever did.
Alma, I found out, was T.C.’s grandmother’s brother. He and his nine siblings — all of whom were at the premiere — are Alma’s great-nephews.
T.C. was just 9 when his uncle Alma died in 1963, but “he remains this idol to all of us in the family,” he says. “We all wanted to be Alma.”
Does the film exaggerate for effect at times? Of course. But through it all, the story stays true to the narrative I remember researching over three decades ago. The characters, the scenes, the “prayer,” all of it comes to life on the big screen.
Christensen agreed with me that sometimes the story seems too good to be true.
“When an audience looks at Alma’s story, they might be prone to think I made up a lot of those stumbling blocks he faced and the situations he had to overcome,” he said. “They’ll go, ‘Oh, here’s the director making things up.’”
And yet, in 1912, a 22-year-old farm boy from southern Utah who three years earlier didn’t know a high jump pit from a rattlesnake pit really did find himself at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, where he won the gold medal over, among others, the great Jim Thorpe.
If you tried to make it better than that, it wouldn’t be as good.