> SOUTHERN INDIANA — Today in London, Queen Elizabeth II officially opens the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. For a lot of people, this is a very big deal and they will stay glued to their television sets to make sure they don’t miss any of the 5,500 hours of Olympic coverage that NBC and its affiliates plan to broadcast.

Except for a few exceptions, I tend to agree with Comedian Bill Maher who says, he doesn’t care about the Olympics, because it’s like watching gym class.

I’ve always preferred the Winter Olympics anyway, because of the highly hazardous sports, like the giant slalom and the luge. My favorite, however, was always ski jumping, which looked like the jumpers were flying, and like NASCAR races, always held the possibility of a sudden crash.

I must have seen the opening to ABC’s Wide World of Sports with Jim McKay, a million times, which showed the unfortunate Slovenian Vinko Bogataj’s horrendous misjump, illustrating “the agony of defeat.” Let’s face it, if there isn’t an ambulance waiting at the bottom of the hill, how interesting can an event be?

The Winter Olympics were always held in some exotic James Bond place like Innsbruck, Sapporo or Lillehammer. Compared to the elegant and sophisticated Winter Games, the Summer Olympics seem a sweaty blue-collar cousin. The summer games also bring back traumatic memories of my dubious high school track and field career.

My older brother had been an All-Conference football player so I was sort of expected to play as well. The school, however, required that all football players had to go out for one additional sport. cross country running, which looked exhausting, was definitely out; baseball triggered unresolved Little League issues; and tennis wasn’t macho enough to avoid teasing from other football players and coaches. This left only track and field.

The track part looked way too much like cross country running, so I decided I would specialize in the shot put and discus throw. I wasn’t nearly big or strong enough for either, but it was a small school and there were only a couple of us participating in the events.

While the rest of the track team ran their hearts out, we only lifted a couple of puny weights. We hardly broke a sweat since we were too busy working on our “technique” — not a bad deal. In track meets, all we had to do is throw the shot three times, the discus three times and our jobs were done. Track meets were spent dodging the head coach, trying to talk to girls in the stands and goofing off with the track team’s trainer, who carried around a large tackle box full of drinks, ace bandages, liniments, salt pills and dextrose tablets. We never sweat enough to actually need a salt pill, but we ate them anyway. We consumed the dextrose tablets like they were candy.

Thank goodness there were no steroids back then.

Once we were standing around throwing the shot — a metal ball weighing 12 pounds — up and down, catching it in the same hand, ostensibly to build up our strength and grip. At that moment, the head track coach happened by, looked at us and said we were the least impressive troupe of jugglers he had ever seen. He was partial to the sprinters and never seemed to like us very much.

Whenever he would see one of us he would tell us to take a lap. Once during a track meet he couldn’t find any of us because we were all standing in line at the refreshment stand. He got so angry that he entered us in the two-mile run. It was agonizing and I don’t think any of us actually finished the race. They eventually had to stop the event so that we wouldn’t be there all night.

My freshman year, we had only one decent shot-putter — a massive fellow named Eddie. Eddie usually came in first or second at most track meets, but after Eddie graduated, we had nothing. A very tall, lanky boy named Keith was actually pretty good throwing the discus, but he was highly inconsistent. He was occasionally known to let the discus slip out of his hands while warming up. They should have called him “Wild Thing” and played the song as a theme whenever he came up to throw.

Over time, I studied the art and science of the shot put and improved my form and technique. I learned that in the old days, all the world records belong to huge men who just stood there flatfooted and threw the shot. Then suddenly, all the records were shattered by a tall skinny fellow who added the dimension of speed and proper form. Speed across the throwing circle seemed to trump size until shot-putters like Texas A&M’s Randy Matson came on scene with the best of both worlds — speed and size.

Ultimately, I had neither speed nor size going for me. My excellent form must have initially intimidated many of our opponents until I actually released the shot or discus and they watched it dribble a few feet, seldom far enough to place in a girl’s competition. Too bad they didn’t give points for style. I ended up scoring only a few points in my whole track-and-field career. I garnered several third places when we played very small schools who only had one participant.

Keith would occasionally place with his discus throws, when he could keep in bounds. Once, however, he actually won a track meet for our team. The score was almost tied with only two events left — a relay race and the last discus throw of the day. We needed to win at least one of these events to beat our perennial rival.

The excitement built as Keith went up to throw the discus at the same time as the relay race was beginning over on the track. Keith was giving this one his all. He spun across the circle in his frightening and erratic style and let the discus fly. It was a very long throw and it immediately went out of bounds. But then like a miracle, it skipped and bounced onto the track, where it managed to knock the other team’s relay runner out of the race. Despite vociferous protests from the other team, the judges gave the relay race to us so we were the meet winners. Our coach said the chagrined Keith had discovered a new strategy and was the team’s secret weapon.

So over the next several days, I may try to watch some of the field events for old time sake. I imagine that if Keith were there, he’d probably hit the queen.

— Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com. Checkout his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at www.planetterry.wordpress.com.