"Extraordinary"

Over at The American Spectator today, Quin Hillyer offers a pleasant summer diversion from all politics, all the time. If you're a sports fan, that is. His title is "The Hall of Sports Transcendence" and the article is a list of his remembrances of significant sporting events and achievements since about 1960. Events and achievements that are memorable because, as he writes, they present "a combination of momentousness, athletic spectacularity (to coin a word), and pure entertainment value of emotional resonance." He concedes that the list is personal and that yours will no doubt differ. But if you're a fan and I'd guess anywhere between 40 and 60 years old, you'll remember, and enjoy remembering, many of the same items.

One memory that failed to make Hillyer's list, but is on mine, is U.S wrestler Dan Gable's Gold Medal at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. I was 15 at the time and while I was familiar with wrestling, I was not a particularly big fan. I was, however, a patriot and of course happy and proud for any American athlete to win any medal. But what I found most memorable about Gable's achievement, then and now, was something altogether different.

While some of you may recall Gable winning the Gold, I doubt you'll remember any of the matches that lead to it. Why? Because not a single one was close. Frankly, they weren't even competitive. Gable won the Gold without giving up a single point in any match. He was quite literally in a league of his own. Whoever the world's second-best wrestler was at the time, no one knew, nor cared. He simply could not compete with Dan Gable.

Interestingly, my reaction to Gable's victory at the time was not to cheer, raise my arms, pump my fists. It was, rather, to simply shake my head in wonder. To be that good at something, to be that good and still manage the discipline to train and demonstrate that you're that good, to be so far superior that not one person on the planet could even give you a good match, all of this was beyond me. Cheering somehow didn't seem appropriate to the occasion. Awe, along with a certain head-shaking puzzlement did however.

Through the years I've always remembered my reaction to Gable's victory and wondered about it. The closest I ever saw it captured in art was in the film Chariots of Fire from the early 1980s. If you know the film, you'll recall that at one point the famous sprinter Harold Abrahams finally gets to run against the equally famous Eric Liddell. Abrahams' chief competitor from Cambridge College, his friend Lord Andrew Lindsay, is also at the match to watch. It's a very big event, great drama, all set-up by the director with a slow, deliberate pacing in order to build the tension for the audience. But when the gun sounds, the match is over before you know it. Liddell not only wins, he wins easily. The camera immediately cuts to a close-up of Lord Lindsay watching. He simply shakes his head and says in an understated way,"Extraordinary."

When I first saw the movie and that scene in it, I remember thinking to myself, "That's it!" The "it" was my reaction to Gable's march to the Gold from years before. In the movie, Lord Lindsay is himself a world-class sprinter. He therefore knows what is required to compete at that level. But as fast as he, himself, is, he has raced his friend Abrahams before and knows that on his best day he cannot beat him. Now he witnesses that very fast friend not only lose, but lose handily to Liddell. This is unbelievable. Is it even possible that there could be someone else that fast, so fast in fact that he is literally in a class by himself? A class of one? "Extraordinary."

Hillyer used the word "transcendence" in his title. If you'll allow, there was for me in Gable winning the Gold Medal something not merely transcendent, but so much so as to become unfamiliar, without cognate, ineffable. Hence my head-shaking reaction. While it would be ridiculous to call Dan Gable's achievement divine, when I witnessed it then, and think about it now, it points in that direction.

Enough! Now what are those Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration up to today?