Sloan’s Fire Burns Bright In Cougs

Rick Sloan at the hammer ring, shouting a word or two to trigger the appropriate technique.

Rick Sloan at the high jump pit, doing an instructional pantomime of the proper plant and takeoff for a jumper.

Rick Sloan bounding from event to event as a Washington State track meet evolves.

This is his decathlon now.

It is at the heart of what he does as WSU’s men’s track coach: teaching, prodding, motivating, getting athletes to exploit their passion for track.

And thereby satisfying his, as well.

“He’s a one-man coaching animal out there; that’s what he likes the best,” said Mike Keller, friend and colleague. “Being on the field with those guys is the most important thing to him.”

Sloan, in his first year as head coach after 21 years as an assistant under John Chaplin, will happily concede that.

“I’m so into the competitions, it’s like I’m living it with each guy,” Sloan said. “When Christos (Pallakis) goes for his third attempt in the pole vault, I have the same emotion he has. Imagine the emotional drain a guy goes through on his own, and then multiply that by all the guys on the team and that’s what I’m feeling out there.”

At 48, Sloan’s own running and weight-training regimen leaves him with probably only a small percentage more body fat than when he became the fourth American athlete to exceed 8,000 points in the decathlon.

And in terms of competitiveness, he feels it is probably more keen now than when he placed seventh in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics decathlon.

“I guess I just love that feeling, that sense of the unknown down in the pit of your stomach when you’re about to compete,” he said. “Are you going to win or lose or have your best day ever? I love that. I mean, if I’m walking down the hallway, I’ll try to be a half-step ahead of you.”

Those sensations go back, he said, as long as he can remember. The Anaheim (Calif.) Bulletin newspaper was the first to chronicle it.

A skinny sixth-grade kid was pictured on the front of the sports section in 1957, caught in full extension during some long-forgotten jumping competition.

The caption suggested that “maybe someday little Ricky Sloan will make it to the Olympics.”

“I didn’t even know what the Olympics were, but I asked my folks about it and once they told me, I thought, yeah, that’s something I think I’d like,” Sloan recalls.

The chances of that picture becoming reality were millions to one. But Sloan made it so.

Old mattresses, uprights welded by his mechanic father, and sticks of bamboo that held carpet rolls became Sloan’s first pole vault apparatus as he began exploring field events.

Despite having Osgood-Schlatter disease in both legs as a teen, Sloan would straddle-style into sawdust pits to high jump 6-foot-8 in high school. The California record at the time was 6-9, but Sloan’s casual attitude toward academics (2.6 high school GPA) left him with little choice but to attend junior college instead of a major track power.

Tom Tellez, who would go on to coach sprinters Carl Lewis and Leroy Burrell, headed the program at Fullerton College at the time.

“He told me he’d get me a summer job, lifeguarding at a pool for $2.15 an hour, and I said ‘I’m coming, man,’ ” Sloan recalled.

There, he worked on a lot more than his tan, improving his marks to 6-10 in the high jump and 16-1 in the vault - impressive efforts for 1966.

Then, at UCLA, he became the first Bruin to exceed 7-feet in the high jump, and he vaulted 17-1 at a time when the world record was 17-7.

Near the start of his senior season in 1968, though, Sloan broke a bone in his ankle and required surgery. He could not recover in time to make the U.S. Olympic team in the jump or vault, and was talked into giving the decathlon a try - an event he’d only gone through three times before.

Still afraid to high jump on the bad leg, Sloan had just one jump practice before the Olympic Trials, but he somehow cleared 6-11 3/4 to set a world decathlon high jump record and make the U.S. team.

At only 21, truly a baby in the decathlon, Sloan took seventh in Mexico City. Yet he was mature enough to take with him an understanding of how immense that accomplishment was.

When the two-day ordeal had completed, late on a stormy night, Sloan walked through the empty stadium carrying his poles. On the P.A. system, someone had piped in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

“I was dead tired, but that music was playing and I looked up at the Olympic flame cast against the black sky and I just started crying,” Sloan said. “It struck me, this was an amazing accomplishment. I get emotional thinking about it even now.”

But the track environment then was such that an athlete - particularly a decathlete - could not make a living in his sport. Sloan and his wife Sandy were expecting the birth of their daughter Kim. And, at age 22, with fewer than 10 decathlons completed, Sloan had to give up competing.

“The thing that stands out to me is that my career was so short,” he said. “Being such a novice in the decathlon, some of the events hadn’t developed for me yet, but the system didn’t really allow for somebody to continue. I honestly believe I could have won a gold medal in Munich in ‘72, and I’m certain I could have at least won a medal.”

Instead, he sold paint at a hardware store for two years while attending night class to earn his teaching credentials.

Hello, reality.

A couple part-time coaching jobs in Southern California led to his appointment as Cougars assistant in 1973, for the princely sum of $10,500.

Initially, he worked mostly with the field event athletes, and had an amazing 20 Cougars clear 7 feet in the high jump.

Beyond that, he’s joined Keller, the Idaho track coach, in coaching decathlon world-record holder Dan O’Brien.

“I really don’t think I’ve met a coach as technically sound as he is,” O’Brien said. “He can take a kid with no skills or just the basics and take them from the ground up.

“And he knows the decathlon because he was a decathlete, but more than that, he’s really a mentally tough guy,” O’Brien said. “He feels like there’s no substitution for hard work, even if it pounds and beats your body up.

“And his feeling is, rain or shine, you’re going to have to be the toughest guy out there.”

The key to the coach’s effectiveness, O’Brien said, is the ability to communicate, to capture the essence of a technique and distill it into a simple form.

“He has a way of getting across to an athlete what he should be doing, and by saying just one or two words, make it clear what has to be done,” O’Brien said.

Despite the increase in paperwork and media obligations, Sloan is enthralled with his job, and particularly enjoys a rapport with assistants Li Li and Mark Macdonald.

He also has very definite ideas about the future of the WSU men’s track program.

“We are going to be competitors in every sense of the word; I want our athletes to be competitors on the track, in the classroom and in every aspect of their lives,” he said. “I don’t want them to settle for mediocrity in anything they do.

“If we recruit the best athletes and then instill that attitude in them, I know we can have a great program.”