Clearing Hurdles by Dan O'Brien and Brad Botkin

Clearing Hurdles: The Quest to be the World's Greatest Athlete by Dan O’Brien and Brad Botkin, is the story of O’Brien’s life. Dan O'Brien won the Gold Medal for the decathlon in the 1996 Olympics at Atlanta. Biographies and autobiographies are not going to be very interesting if the subject in question has led a charmed life throughout with few challenges to overcome. It is the bad things that have happened in their lives, the journey overcoming the odds, that make the story interesting. Dan O'Brien certainly had his share of “interesting.”.

Dan was an orphan. He was biracial living in a conservative small town. He did get adopted and that was a stoke of good luck. His family was poor but relatively happy. He went to college in Idaho and was not ready to be on his own in the world. He partied. He struck up a fond relationship with alcohol. He had shown great athletic promise in high school and had gotten a scholarship at the University of Idaho, but it wasn’t long before he rendered himself academically ineligible.

You have probably heard similar stories before. Bad decision leads to problems which leads to drinking which leads to more bad decisions which lead to more drinking. For many people, this is the end of the story. A cycle that leads to oblivion. But some learn to overcome their self-destructive tendencies. At some point it hit home where his life was headed and he turned it around (with the help of some very good coaches). He started making a name for himself.

Reebok signed him as part of their marketing campaign. Do you remember the “Dan and Dave” commercials from the 1990’s? He was the Dan. The commercials always ended with the tag line: “to be settled in Barcelona.” Meaning that the 1992 Barcelona Olympics would crown Dan or Dave (Johnson) as the world’s greatest athlete depending on which one won the gold medal. Things didn’t work out in Barcelona. You will have to read the book to find out why. Dan’s life was full of highs and lows, and that was one of the lows.

Eventually, things worked out though, as things usually do for people who are asked to write their autobiography. Thus, we have a book that through Dan’s experiences give us a powerful message: don’t give up when bad things happen to you. Use them to learn and grow. You can find strength you didn’t know you had. You might not win a gold medal at the Olympics, but you might surprise yourself (and those people along the way who told you to give it up).

Star Liner

Comments

The Trip Home

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and

That 70's Decade

Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things that ha

Tyranny of the Masses

I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local level t

A speculative mind

Search This Blog