| | By David Williams
Scripps Howard News Service
JONESBORO, Ark. -- There is no delicate way to say this: Jeff
Hartwig has snakes in his basement.
And no, that's not pole vaulters' slang for being a bit out there,
though it could be -- pole vaulters in general, and this one in
particular, tending toward the unconventional.
|  | | Jeff Hartwig has been mentioned as a gold medal favorite. |
Hartwig, the American record-holder and a gold medal favorite for
the Sydney Olympics, really does have snakes in his basement: Here a
rainbow boa, there a yellow anaconda, everywhere a python, some 80
snakes in all.
"Now, this is one of the pythons I was telling you about," he
says, moving from glass case to glass case, where snakes of various
lengths and hues slither and loll among the branches and leaves he's
provided for them.
He introduces them by name and by nature, by their histories and
their appetites. He introduces them tirelessly, in intricate detail,
as if the world at the top of the steps can wait.
And in doing so, perhaps, he introduces himself.
"Snakes are sort of loners like me," says Hartwig, 32, a native
St. Louisan who moved to Jonesboro to attend Arkansas State and hasn't
strayed. "There's a sort of boldness or independence about them.
"I like being by myself. I like taking care of things on my own.
And I think maybe I see that in the snakes."
Snakes and heights.
They are two of our worst fears. They are Jeff Hartwig's twin
obsessions.
The snakes you've met. The heights you'll have to imagine.
Last month in a meet at Arkansas State, the 6-3, 185-pound Hartwig
broke his American record with a vault of 19 feet, 9 1/4 inches -- the
highest in the world this year, according to the International Amateur
Athletic Federation statistics.
"He's going to be one of the guys they're talking about as a
favorite to win," says his coach, Earl Bell, himself a three-time
Olympic pole vaulter and 1984 bronze medalist.
"He can win the whole thing, but a lot of things have to fall in
place. You have to be a little bit lucky. Plus, you have to be as good
as he is."
We don't know if Hartwig -- who seeks to qualify for Sydney during
the U.S. Track and Field Olympic Trials, which start this Friday in
Sacramento -- is as good as gold.
But we already know he's a star.
You may have read about him last summer in Esquire, a five-page
spread headlined, "The Snake-Handling Pole Vaulter."
You may have seen him last month on NBC-TV's Today, profiled by
former Olympic gold medal swimmer Summer Sanders.
Pole vaulters are good material, anyway. You'll find eccentrics
among them, you'll find thrill-mongerers, and the media -- faced each
Olympic year with introducing little-known athletes who toil in
little-understood events to a mainstream audience -- loves them.
"You might call them risk-takers," says Bell, whose athletic
equipment business and pole vaulting school -- Bell Athletics -- also is
the training home of standout American vaulters Tye Harvey and Chad
Harting.
Their hobbies? Harvey paraglides and Harting plays guitar in a punk
rock band.
But a basement crawling with snakes?
"Yeah," Bell says, "that's a weird one for anybody."
It's no wonder, then, that so many journalists have beaten a path
here. What's surprising is that they found it.
Bell Athletics is a giant metal building -- 200 feet long, 60 feet
wide, about 30 feet from floor to ceiling -- in the farmland outside
Jonesboro, on Highway 226. A UFO would look no more out of place.
"Big ole patch of soybeans, was all it was," Bell says.
Now it's a metal building, a gravel lot, and nothing much stirring
outside but an American flag that flaps from a pole beside the road.
"I guess it seems a little bit strange," Hartwig says. "The
Olympic champion, he's from France and he lives in Paris.
"The best pole vaulters in Germany come from one city near
Cologne. The best Russians are from Moscow."
When he ventures far from home, people ask Hartwig where he lives.
"I say, `Jonesboro, Arkansas.' "
People say: "Where?"
Call it the middle of nowhere. But maybe it's the center of the
pole vaulting world.
It is your standard pole vaulter's story -- boy meets gravity; boy
defies gravity -- taken to a higher power.
But it's also an old-fashioned story of an underdog.
Hartwig, you see, isn't a natural, though he looks every bit the
part- tall and lean with piercing eyes to make a python blink first.
But ask Bell, 44, if he remembers the first time he saw Hartwig
vault. Ask him if he pegged him as a natural.
Bell laughs.
"That was absolutely not what happened," Bell says. "No, he was
no good.
"He was a 14-foot pole vaulter in high school, which is relatively
good. But never the type that you'd say, `Look how incredible this guy
is.'
"And he was a 17-foot vaulter in college, which is pretty strong,
which is pretty good.
"But you wouldn't say, `He's the next guy.'
"He was pretty decent. He just kept at it ... He was an
over-decade success."
Hartwig, sitting behind a desk in Bell's office after a weekday
workout, says, "Physically, I was never an overachiever. We had a
high school kid in here this past weekend who could run faster than I
ran today.
"I was never the strongest guy, was never the fastest guy. But I
was right in there. I was one of the fastest, one of the strongest."
Just about every year, he would vault a little higher. He would
take his defiance of gravity a little further.
He made the Olympic team in 1996, finishing tied for 11th in
Atlanta.
Four years later, he's the American record-holder and a gold-medal
favorite.
"It can happen," Bell said of Hartwig's dream, and perhaps of
yours.
Hartwig is standing on the deck of his comfortable home in the
woods outside Jonesboro. George, a green iguana, rests on his
shoulders.
"My house where I grew up was almost identical to this, as far as
the setting," he says.
"I was off in the woods. It was a new development when our family
moved there. So it was not uncommon at all to have a lot of snakes
around the yard.
"So in the summertime when I was a kid -- I couldn't drive anywhere
-- I was off in the woods catching snakes.
"My parents would come home from work and just freak. I had snakes
in the garbage can, snakes in all the boxes. My mom would have shot me
if I'd have brought them in the house."
Jeff, though, will tell you the events of this summer -- first in
Sacramento and finally, he hopes, in Sydney -- won't define him.
He'll tell you, "I know that people look at track and field and
only think it happens every four years with this one meet called the
Olympic Games.
"(But) my career isn't strictly about the Olympics."
Maybe this is what an athlete who's being measured against the gold
standard must tell himself, to cope with the pressure, the
expectations, with the knowledge that on any given day, anything can
happen.
Or maybe, being a bit of a loner, Hartwig means what he says.
Maybe, having a bold, independent streak, he's jumping for himself,
not for fame, gold or riches.
There's more to life, more to Hartwig, than vaulting. There are his
reptilian friends in the basement, who know him only as their keeper.
"The snakes," he says, "they don't care if I jump 20 feet or
don't jump at all."
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