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BEIJING. CHINA |
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GAMES EDITION |
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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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OF 'MOON' MONDSCHEIN
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Waking up echoes with a grand old Olympian
of TheColumnists.com
In the 1940s in New York I would go to the indoor track meets at Madison Square Garden--the Millrose Games and others. I would see the great runners--Gregory Rice, Mal Whitfield, Reggie Pearman and Harrison Dillard--and pole vaulter Cornelius Warmerdam.
And I would enjoy the high jump duels between NYU’s Irv Mondschein and Bill Vessie of Columbia. I would bet dimes on different events with friends. And the other day when I sat with Mondschein in the cafeteria at Haverford College here outside Philadelphia, I reminded him that he had cost me a dime or two.
It was a delight for me, after migrating to Haverford from Long Island three years ago, to learn that Mondschein was here as an assistant coach of the Haverford College track team. With the Olympics coming up, it seemed like a good time to wake up the echoes with Mondschein, an Olympian, a longtime respected track coach.
He is 84 now, a burly 5 foot 9, 200 pounds--four inches and some 10 pounds less than when he was a high jump Adonis. He has clear blue eyes behind wire-frame glasses, thinning steel gray hair, He nurses a reconstructed knee that has halted at least for now any athletic endeavor.
“I was able to play basketball, five on five, until I was 72,” he said with a sigh.
Mondschein long carried the nickname, “Moon.” “Because,” he explained, “Mondschein means ‘moonshine’ in German.” He played football at NYU and was a standout in the high jump and decathlon. He won the NCAA high jump championships in 1947 and 1948, jumping in the six-feet, seven range. They now jump close to eight feet. He won the AAU decathlon championships in 1944, 1946, 1947.
He was considered a solid contender in the decathlon at the 1948 Olympics in London, but finished eighth in the event won by American Bob Mathias. “I had a disaster in the hurdles,” he said. “I knocked over five hurdles, and then I was tense and did badly in the javelin.” He finished 17th in the hurdles and last in the javelin.
As he looks back on it, he says, “One of the big mistakes I made was that I continued to play football. If I wasn’t playing football, I would have trained more and worked harder on the decathlon. If I had done as well as I should have, I could have finished second.” With a twinkle he added, “maybe even beaten Mathias that year--though nobody could beat him four years later.”
Mondschein went on to a rich career as a coach. The highlight: He was the head coach of the first team Israel sent to the Olympics in 1952 at Helsinki. “To be in that place at that time and what it meant for Israel was thrilling. My chest must have swelled five inches as we marched into the stadium with the Israeli flag. I think my father [who came to the United States from the Ukraine in 1920] was more proud of me about that than anything else I achieved.”
Mondschein said, “We had a nice little team.” (He added a few Yiddishisms that eluded me.).
He was an assistant field events coach for the United States at the 1988 Games in Seoul. “I worked the decathlon and helped out with the vaulters. We didn’t do well. The best thing you can do in the short time you have is to let them do what they want to do without getting in their way.”
He worked as the athletic director, and
coached basketball and football along with track at Lincoln University
outside Philadelphia. He coached high schools on Long Island
and had a long career as a track coach at Penn. He is ever a
man about track and field; (I sometimes couldn’t follow
him when he reeled off various times and heights: track and field
people are a special breed.)
Too much the jock to be idle, he is a volunteer coach of the
jumping events (pole vault, triple jump, high jump) at Haverford
College. “We had a [Division 3] All American in the triple
jump, Chaz Thomas,” he noted.
He married a Japanese woman, Momoe Kokubo, and they have three children, one a girl. The genes carried through to eldest son Mark, a 15-foot pole vaulter in high school, and Brian, a decathlon and polo vault stalwart in college. Mondschein has high hopes for his grandson--Mark’s son--a six-foot, four-and-a-half inch pole vaulter at Virginia Tech who competed in the trials for this Olympics. He cleared a height of 18 feet, five inches, not yet good enough to make the team in a sport in which the world record is close to 20 feet.
He looks forward to the Beijing Olympics, recognizing the change in the nature of things. “Track and field used to be the main thing. No more. And I don’t think the Olympics play as important a part anymore because they are all pros. They regard the Olympics as a paycheck for the future. They run in meets [netting handsome paydays] rather than train up to the Olympics and I see where three of them pulled tendons recently. “
He regards jingoism as the worst part of the Olympics now. And drugs. “I would have bet my life that Marian Jones didn’t use drugs.” Jones had her medals taken away and is serving a jail sentence for lying about use of drugs. “What a tragedy,” he said.
When we parted, Irv (Moon) Mondschein limped over to the athletic center for a workout on a bicycle to build up his reconstructed knee. I didn’t ask him to reimburse me for any of the dimes I lost betting on him.
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Aug. 4, 2008.
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