Friday, October 05, 2007
Al Oerter was my home-town Olympian. The NYTimes obit says he was from West Islip, and went to Sewanhaka High School, but we knew him as a Bay Shore boy. The story is told that he showed up at a Bay Shore High practice once-- this would have been in the 70's-- and let it rip with a discus that wasn't found until a homeowner a block away came upon it when he was raking leaves the following fall. Field events and sprints are both now so throughly pervaded by performance enhancing drugs that they almost seem like professional wrestling, but Oerter was the real deal. I never met him, but I know a lot of people who knew him, and his reputation was that he was-- another old fashioned notion-- a true gentleman.
