James Dickey's Glory

By Author: kinhomchan
Total Articles: 66
Comment this article

In 1940 I was a senior in high schoo1. My main sport was football, but my preference was really track.I was a big strong animal who could run fast, and I gloried in this fact. My conference, though I lived in Atlanta, was not the conference in which the big Atlanta high schools competed. I ran in the North Georgia Interscholastic Conference, or N.G.I.C, as it was popularly known. The high-hurdles4 event, which was my specialty, was often held on grass, up the middle of a football field. This was the case at the 1940 N.G.I.C. meet. We qualified in the afternoon, all of us trying hard but not so hard as to tire ourselves out for the night's final. In the trials I lost to a fine hurdler from Canton, Georgia, and then went out with him, soaked5 with shower water, and got a cheeseburger6.1 felt that I had not run well, that my start had been bad, that I had not been able to get a good grip on the turf7 with my spikes, that I had been too high over the hurdles, that my finish had been poor. But my conqueror had set a new N.G.I. C. record, and he should have. When I suited up for the finals, though I was ready, I felt that I had come ...
... to run. It was a cool night, and there were several hundred people in the stands, and when they called the hurdles final, a great many people were clustered10 about the finish line, where the tape11 glimmered with ghostly promise for the winner. I ran in the next lane from the boy from Canton. We shook hands: a new friendship, a fierce rivalry, for I knew he would give no quarter, and I knew damn well that I wasn't planning to give any. We got down on the blocks. Before us was a great seat of grass, with faint line stripes from spring practice across it. I concentrated on getting as much pressure on my legs as I could. I would try to get off well, though I was too big to hope for a really fast start. The gun cracked, and we were gone. I paid no attention to where anyone else was but concentrated on form and on picking up speed between hurdles. But I could dimly14 sense the Canton boy. At the fifth hurdle I could tell that we were dead even. The finish-line crowd was coming at us like a hurricane. I concentrated on staying low over the hurdles and made really good moves on the next three. I began to edge him by inches, and to the next hurdles I thought that if I didn't hit the next two I'd make it. I also said to myself, as I remember, don't play it safe. Go low over the last stick, and then give it everything you've got up the final straight. But I did hit the last hurdle. I hit it with the inner ankle of my left foot, tearing the flesh to the bone, as I found out later, and the injury left a scar which I bear to this day. However, my frenzied momentum was such that I won by a yard, careening wildly into the crowd after the tape broke around my neck. I smashed into the spectators and bowled over a little boy, hitting straight into his nose with my knee. He lay on the smoky grass crying, his nose bleeding, and I came back, blowing like a wounded stallion, everybody congratulating me on a new N.G.I.C. record, but I went to the boy, raised him up in my arms, wiped the blood from his nose, tried to comfort him, and kissed him. That raising-up of an injured, unknown child was the greatest thing that I have ever gleaned19 from sports.