Law & Oerter: Locking Up the Gold

By John Jeansonne | Staff Writer

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THE PLACE: New Hyde Park, Long Island. Sewanhaka High School's athletic fields.

The time: Spring, 1952. Early afternoon.

The scene: Daily practice for the school's track and field team.

``It was one of those magic moments in my life,'' Al Oerter said. ``My sophomore year in high school. I had started as a sprinter, then I became a miler for a few months, but I kept growing. I was a horse; it took all that energy just to push all that weight around the track. The thing'' - the discus; frisbee-like but heavier and made of wood and steel -- ``kept skipping onto the track during practice as I ran past. And I'd throw it back . . .''

It was one of those movie moments. One of those slow-motion, music-building-to-a-crescendo, sun-breaking-through-the-clouds, defining moments. Historic.

Al Oerter became a discus thrower, on his way to becoming Long Island's greatest Olympian. (Along with 1920s distance legend Paavo Nurmi, in fact, Oerter would be named by Track & Field News in the 1980s as one of the sport's two best Olympians ever.)

He was born in Astoria, Queens, in 1936, the oldest of two children of Al and Mary Oerter. His father owned a family plumbing business and, later, a contruction business; his mother worked in film distribution for Paramount Pictures. ``And she had committed to memory,'' Oerter said, ``all the populations of all the cities in the country, and how many movie screens they had.''

With his sister, Marianne, three years Al's junior, the family lived ``behind the plumbing store'' and young Al played stickball under the el of the Ditmars Blvd. train station. ``When I was 8 or 10, we moved to New Hyde Park,'' he said, ``when New Hyde Park was mostly potato fields.''

Oerter continued to lift weights in the basements of various houses with his friends, something he had taken up when he was ``7 or 8 - a lot younger than physiologists would recommend today.'' He played baseball like his father, who had been a semipro player and once played alongside future major leaguer Tony Cuccinello. So when Cuccinnello was third base coach for the Cincinnati Reds, he evaluated young Al. ``I was about 13, 14,'' Oerter said. ``I pitched and played centerfield. Sandlot ball. I could throw the ball right through you, but when I played centerfield, instead of throwing it to the catcher or shortstop, I threw it right over the stadium.'' Just as he would later do with the discus. ``I don't care where it lands,'' Oerter said. ``Just measure it!''

His mother died of cancer when Oerter was 16, ``and my heart just wasn't in sports for a while.'' He quit high school football, then realized that his daily run home from school - roughly two miles from the New Hyde Park Road School to north of Hillside Avenue - was enjoyable. So he went out for track in the spring of 1952.

And a discus skipped into his life.

Within two years of that ``magic'' moment at practice, Oerter set the New York State record in the event -- 184 feet, 2 inches -- that stood for 13 years. He went off to the University of Kansas on an academic scholarship and majored in business. He said the Kansas natives wondered, ``Who is that guy from the East? Six-four and 225 and he just wants to throw the discus. They thought I should be playing footabll. I always told them that they make All-Americans in football every year, but they only make Olympic gold medalists once every four years. But I went out to watch a football practice anyway, the third or fourth day of practice. It was in the 90s that day. Really hot. And they were in full pads jarring the fillings loose in each other. Really hitting. That was enough for me. I couldn't see it.''

At the beginning of his junior year at Kansas, he went off to Melbourne, Australia, for the 1956 Olympic Games and won the gold medal in the discus. He graduated from Kansas in 1958 and came home to Long Island. He took a job at Grumman Aerospace in computer programming. He married and raised two daughters. He settled in West Islip. And once every four years -- in 1960, 1964, 1968 - he went off to the Olympic Games - in Rome, Tokyo, Mexico -- and won the gold medal in the discus, each time setting an Olympic record. Until Carl Lewis won a fourth straight gold medal in long jump (1984, 1988, 1992, 1996), no one had matched Oerter's feat of winning the same individual Olympic event that many times.

And then, a decade after his retirement from the sport, Oerter's story actually got better. There was a scene sometime in 1976 when Oerter was rummaging through his West Islip garage and dug out his old discus and, as soon as he threw it, the wooden center fell out. He ordered new ones and, in early summer of 1977, there was another scene: Oerter paid his 75 cents to enter a developmental, all-comers track meet at St. John's University, where the participants in the discus that day included a thin man in black horn-rimmed glasses, yellow dress shirt (sleeves rolled up), dark brown dress slacks and well-worn white tennis shoes.

Having reached 40, divorced, with his two daughters grown, Oerter had decided to train for the 1980 Olympics. He narrowly missed making the three-man U.S. discus team, finishing in fourth place, inches out of third. He would not have competed in the 1980 Moscow Olympics anyway, because President Jimmy Carter had called for a U.S. boycott months earlier, protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984, still on the scene at age 47, Oerter was bumped out of the Olympic Trials by an injury.

But his ongoing tale shined the best light on the Olympics: He competed because he enjoyed it.