Tragedy Proves Invincibility Has Limitations

He wanted to become a teacher and a coach, but first Dusty Lane wanted to be Dan O’Brien.

Not like him. Him.

Many giant steps before he became the Olympic decathlon champion, O’Brien spent a couple of quarters at the Community Colleges of Spokane repairing his grade-point average and his reputation. In a remarkable 1988 exhibition, O’Brien scored 60 points by himself in the Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges track meet wearing the dark blue Spokane jersey with the white pinstripes.

The very uniform Dusty Lane glommed onto a decade later.

“I remember he’d come home and just kind of walk around in the singlet,” said Jeff Magnuson, one of Lane’s roommates. “Larry (CCS coach Larry Beatty) tells the story about taking him out to the shed to look for a uniform and telling him, `Those are Dan O’Brien’s.’

“At that point, Dusty didn’t care what size shorts came with them - if he got extra small, he was still going to wear them.”

In time, he got not only O’Brien’s CCS uniform but his decathlon record, as well.

It’s a great story, one that deserved to be told at some future Olympics - and Lane’s teammates, rivals, coaches, family and friends fully expected that it would, eventually, so obvious was his athletic potential.

But 11 days ago, he jumped out of a raft in the Spokane River and never made it to shore.

A good-time float turned tragic. Four friends, a couple of beers, no lifejackets.

One friend took the raft through the rapids. Two bailed out and swam to safety 25 feet away. Lane, a certified scuba diver in a wetsuit, inexplicably took off for the far shore - maybe 200 feet distant.

As the unspeakable news spread, few of Lane’s many friends believed it.

“We all thought, `This is Dusty Lane,”’ recalled Beatty. “We knew this kid made it through the rapids and swam to shore, that he had to be just hurt somewhere.”

But the price of being reminded that none of us is invincible - that even the best among us are vulnerable to the worst decisions and the most perilous risks - is always so damnably high.

Make that the grim moral of the Dusty Lane story, if you choose. It is certainly no trifle.

Just as meaningful, though, is that Dusty Lane was all about the gift of possibility a reminder that if there are no limits on imagination and will then there can be no limits on achievement.

Three years ago, he had to be coaxed out of Cashmere to give track another try. Next fall, he was headed to the University of Alabama on a full scholarship.

“Once Dusty knew what he wanted,” said James Tomlin, another roommate, “there wasn’t anything that could keep him from getting it.”

But coming out of high school - an eight-time state champ in track and twice in wrestling - Lane didn’t seem to want a future in athletics. He enrolled in the carpentry program at Wenatchee Valley College and set about learning a trade.

“I’d recruited him over the summer and called him again in January,” Beatty remembered. “It wasn’t until track season started that he got the itch again. He called and asked if he could come down and I told him if he passed 12 hours at Wenatchee, he could be eligible here.”

He enrolled on April 1. Five days later, Beatty entered Lane in his first decathlon. Knowing that he’d never pole vaulted or picked up a javelin - and only trained a week - Beatty figured his new recruit might score 5,000 points.

He scored 6,400. This year, he got the total up to 7,370 - nearly 100 higher than O’Brien scored in 1988. In his third race in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles, Lane broke a 13-year-old conference record. In his last meet, he shattered two more school records by running 10.36 and 20.96 in the 100 and 200 meters.

“You go to the drag races and feel that wind going by you,” Tomlin said. “It felt that fast, really. When he ran, everyone stopped and watched.”

Generating that speed was a motor that never ran down.

“He had some physical gifts, but he really wanted to be good,” said Beatty, “and he did everything it took to be good. He came here weighing 148 pounds and wound up at 188. You had to kick him out of the stadium.”

And even that didn’t work.

“He’d hide implements around the stadium and sneak back in after dinner or on Sunday to work out more,” Beatty said. “I sat down on the vault pit once and felt something hard. I dug under the covers and there’s a discus. I ask our throws coach, `Bill, this is a $150 discus - what’s it doing under here?’ And he said, `I checked that out to Dusty.”’ And when his roommates trudged home from practice and collapsed on the couch to play video games, Lane “would be out in the back playing with the dog,” Tomlin recalled.

Projecting him on to the medal stand in the Olympics of 2004 or 2008 would have been the height of presumptuousness, but Beatty noted that Lane was already “world class” in five of the 10 decathlon events. He also pointed out the new collegiate record holder, Tom Pappas of Tennessee, is another NWAACC alum.

“And Dusty had more tools than that kid does,” Beatty insisted.

His friends and his coach say Dusty Lane would have inspired their devotion even if he’d never done anything special on a track, and this is what they’ll speak of at his memorial service next Monday at the Free Methodist Church in Wenatchee at 2 p.m. He was a natural at friendship the same way he was at the decathlon. Their emotional investment in the after-dark search when he turned up missing was total.

What they knew to be his promise made it that much more desperate.

“Just the silence was killing us,” Tomlin admitted.

The silence, and the rush of the river.