Shot putters to throw weight around at Millrose Games

Make way. For all the running and jumping action scheduled Friday night in the 103rd Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, featuring a few dozen Olympic medalists and world champions, there is nothing that elbows everyone else out of the way quite like the shot put competition.

That is partly due to the impressive field of shot putters - three of the four competitors have been world champions and the fourth is reigning U.S. indoor champ - and mostly because of the event itself: Mountain men heaving cannon balls across a crowded room.

It doesn't take much imagination to picture the damage that a fellow such as Christian Cantwell - 6-5 and 300 pounds - can do by hurling a 16-pound object more than 70 feet. "In the U.S.," he noted, "they make us use a ball that is a little different, covered in plastic. Everywhere else, we throw a steel ball inside. But whether it's this one going 70 feet, or the other one, it's going to do some damage."

Howard Schmertz, emeritus director of the Millrose Games, remembered how Garden officials in the 1980s declared there would be no more shot put competition after one thrower put a hole on the outside edge of the sprint straightaway. The shot put was moved to Manhattan College (where the weight throw, indoor version of the hammer throw, still is contested) for years but returned five years ago.

So, not quite three hours after the first Millrose running event at 4 p.m., approximately halfway to the Wanamaker Mile at 9:50, a space will be cleared for the big guys. Cantwell, the 2009 world outdoor champion; '05 world titlist Adam Nelson and former world indoor gold medalist Reese Hoffa promise their usual adrenaline-fueled performance.

"It's a mixture of strong-man, sprinters and showmanship," Cantwell said. "If we do it right, it comes off pretty well. The crowd can tell, without really knowing how far we're throwing, if it's a good throw by how we react."

Plus, there is the lurking danger. At the University of Missouri, where the 29-year-old Cantwell competed as a collegian, there are wooden boards framing the indoor shot area that he regularly splinters with good throws. At the 2001 national championship meet in Eugene, Ore., he accidentally hit a shot put official in the neck with a warm-up throw.

That turned out happily enough, especially with the victim's full recovery and the fact that the incident came up as an answer in Trivial Pursuit. But it did ruin Cantwell's ability to compete well in that meet.

"The next year the guy came up to me with a plaque he had made of the Trivial Pursuit card. But one thing I always tell the kids in practice," said Cantwell, "is to keep your heads up."