Transcript: "The Pole Vaulter", a Story By Matthew Dicks

This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks's story, The Pole Vaulter, at a Moth StorySLAM. You can watch Matthew telling the story here:

So, it's the spring of 1986, and Coach Cronin has decided we need two more pole vaulters for our high school track team. We have Jimmy Dean, who's our one pole vaulter. Jimmy is a senior and he's a stoner, but he's the best pole vaulter in all of Massachusetts in 1986. He can vault 17 feet and win every meet, but some meets are called relays, and those meets need to have three competitors. All of those competitors in pole vault need to clear opening height, or nothing counts. The opening height is seven feet, six inches.

So, in every one of those meets throughout Jimmy's entire career, we've never scored any points. Coach Cronin decides he's going to fix it. He's going to find two new vaulters, so he takes all the mediocre sprinters and all the mediocre long jumpers, and he brings us all down to the pole vault pit to have a vault off.

Now, pole vaulting is an interesting sport. It requires strength, speed, and precision, but mostly, you just have to be crazy. You take a pole, about 12 feet long, and hold one end of it at the end of a runway. You run as fast as you possibly can for 18 steps. During the last three steps, you raise the pole over your head, jam the other end of the pole into a metal box set into the ground, throw your feet directly into the air, throw your head directly to the ground, and pull back on the pole. Theoretically, it throws you over the bar.

I did not vault that first day. I went left, wrenched my knee, and literally ended up in a gully. But the pole was still in my hand. I had not let it go, and therefore, I became a pole vaulter.

Two of us didn't let go, and so that day, the pole vaulting team, probably the best name for a team ever, was Jimmy Dean, Jack Daniels, and Matthew Dicks.

Fast forward to the first relay. I'd been practicing for about six weeks with Jack, and I'm occasionally reaching opening height. I know all the pressure is on me. Jack is older than me, and I want to be good, because the real secret to team sports is you want to beat your opponent, but what you really want is your teammates to like you. The only way you can get them to like you is to either perform at a very high level or perform higher than the mediocre people on your team. I cannot perform at a high level, so my goal is to beat Jack and hope that he's mediocre.

I don't like Jack to begin with. He's better-looking than me, he's faster than me, and his name is Jack Daniels, and my name is Matthew Dicks. People look at me and go, "Oh, Dicks?" And I go, "No, it's like more than one penis."

And I'd like to complain about my name, but my father, hand to God, is named Leslie, and he goes by Les. I have two uncles named Harold, and they both go by Harry. So, I don't complain about my name very often.

However, in pole vaulting, there's a lot of waiting. You wait to vault, and they need to let you know because, like Jimmy, some people aren't paying attention. So, the way they let you know is the official will announce, "Smith up, Jones on deck, Peterson in the hole." For me, I would hear, "Dicks up, Dicks on deck, Dicks in the hole," and it breaks your concentration when you're getting ready to vault.

I had a lot going against me that day. So, Dicks was up. He was at the end of the runway, and by some miracle of miracles, I made opening height on my first vault. At that moment, I realized I was going to be Mr. Dependable. I was going to be better than Jack, no matter what.

And when Jack missed his first vault, I can't tell you how good I felt. Then Jack missed his second vault, and for a moment, I thought the sun had come out and shined upon me. But then I realized that if Jack makes his third vault, he becomes Mr. Clutch. And Mr. Clutch is damn well better than Mr. Dependable.

This son of a [__]! I believed, at that moment, had set it up so that all the drama and all the attention would be on him. On his third and final attempt, he would achieve opening height, stealing my win and not allowing me to be better than New Yorker.

So, Jack ran down that runway, and I begged. I pleaded with all my mental energy. I just hoped that Jack would lose. I didn’t want the pole to break, because then he would have an excuse. I wanted something bad to happen.

And it did. On his way up, Jack's foot kicked the bar, and he failed. I was happy.

Then something terrible happened. My team won the meet, and they won by like 50 points. Jack missing the pole, missing the bar—it didn't matter anymore. Nobody cared because we beat the team by 50 points.

What I wanted was for us to lose by one point. I wanted to step onto that bus being the guy who cleared opening height, and everyone's staring at Jack, knowing that I was better than Jack. But because we had crushed the team so badly, nobody paid any attention to me.

So, I learned three very important lessons that day. Number one: Although the world does revolve around me, not everyone notices. I'm sort of trapped like the sun in this pre-Copernican world where everyone refuses to acknowledge that it revolves around me, and I'm just going to have to accept that.

Number two: I learned that while I've got my little mind games going, trying to become better than mediocre, everybody else has a mind game too. Some of them actually have noble mind games, like, "I want to win, I want our team to do well, and I want to support our teammates." And while they're doing all that crap, nobody pays attention to the rest of the mind games. So, while you're thinking that the world is revolving around you, it really is only revolving around me, and everybody else isn’t paying attention.

And the third, and really the most important lesson is: You don’t get attention in life by being the best of the rest. You really need to be the best of the best. And that day, and for many subsequent days, I was not.

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