62 years since the invention of Foz's flop

A gangly Medford High sophomore first flopped April 20, 1963

Dick and I outside Oregon State’s Reser Stadium in October 2019. And, yes, that is a Beaver shirt I’m wearing — in honor of Foz (and book sales).

SUNDAY MARKS THE 62nd anniversary of Oregon State’s Dick Fosbury invention of the Fosbury Flop high jump style that revolutionized the way high jumpers around the world get over the bar.

(I was going to run this column Sunday, but that’s Easter, and I thought some might think my high-jump reference a blasphemous alternative to the exaltation “he has risen” — and, given, Dick’s Olympic height of 7’4 1/4”, “he has risen, indeed.”)

It was 62 years ago Sunday, about 2 p.m., that the then 16-year-old Medford High sophomore, while going over the bar in the Grants Pass Rotary Invitational, instinctively leaned back while using the “scissors” high-jumping method. The rest is literal history.

Here’s how I recounted that April 20, 1963, moment in The Wizard of Foz: Dick Fosbury’s One-Man High Jump Revolution:

[Fosbury] exhaled. Eyed the bar. Gently rocked back and forth. Burst toward his target. Jumped. Scissored — and, instinctively, the answer came: lean back. In the flush of inspiration he did so, which forced up his hips, and therefore his butt, up and over the bar … . When he hit the wood chips, the bar was still in place; he had a new personal best [5’6”]. And a slight sensation that he might be on to something here.

“The bar goes to five-foot-eight,” said [the official) Mr. Byrd, ratcheting up the standard with help from another official on the other side.

A few jumpers were only now starting the competition, so confident that they could make this height. All made good on that confidence, clearing 5’8”. Now it was Fosbury’s turn. Stay in the game, he said to himself. Stay in the game. Raise your butt. Elsewhere, discus throwers were grunting, fans cheering, runners puffing. Fosbury heard none of it. He angled toward the bar, scissored his left leg high, over the bar as usual. But now, instead of automatically repeating a similar kick with the right leg as if he were a can-can dancer, he leaned even further back than on the previous jump. His butt and hips arched over the bar. And as they came down, the motion naturally forced his legs up and over.

Surprisingly, he felt no bar as he descended.

[Dean] Benson, the MHS coach, nudged assistant coach Fred Spiegelberg.

“See that?” Spieg was too spellbound to reply.

A year after first trying his backward style, Fosbury cleared a school record 6’3 1/2” in the same Grants Pass meet.

After having gone nearly a year without improving his 5’4” best, Dick had now gone four inches higher, setting two personal bests in less than an hour — thanks to this new-fangled “layout” style: half scissors, half who-knew-what? All feel. All instinct. All spontaneous. “I didn't change my style,” Fosbury later said. “It changed inside me.”

“The bar goes to five-feet-ten-inches,” said Mr. Byrd.