THE WILL TO WIN LAWRENCE JOHNSON

Editor’s Note:

The following is Pole Vault Carolina’s interview with Lawrence Johnson, who joined our club on Zoom for an inspirational talk. Lawrence is a NCAA record holder; 1996 Olympian; Silver Medalist at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney; 2001 Indoor World Champion, and the first Black man to represent the United States in the pole vault at the Olympics and in international competition. This interview has been adapted for TAKEOFF.

Lawrence grew up in Norfolk, VA. I met him in 1995 when he was a junior at the University of Tennessee. At the time, I said to myself, he is the future of the sport. He was a great athlete, and an amazing competitor. When he spoke, it was not cockiness, but conviction. Like, I’ve got this and I’m going to win. He committed to work harder than anyone else because he wanted to be better than everyone else. Lawrence was a student of the event. What struck me the most was that he expected to win.

Lawrence used his talents to open doors and tear down stereotypes. He was the first African-American to win an Olympic medal in pole vault. To be blunt, pole vault was a sport for white people. Lawrence challenged that. His athletic journey was more complicated than the physical demands every athlete faces, because of the color of his skin. We remember important moments in time, and I vividly recall the details, because I knew the story behind it.

Lawrence attended the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He was a 4-time NCAA champion and record holder. His mark of 19’7” stood for twenty-two years until it was broken by Mondo Duplantis in May of 2019. Lawrence finished 8th at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In Sydney in 2000, he won Olympic silver on attempts. A fantastic accomplishment! He went on to win the World Championships in 2001.

Lawrence currently coaches a club, LoJo Vault Assault, in the greater Philadelphia area. You will see him at the larger national meets like New Balance, with a group of athletes, and his wife Christina by his side, helping the team as well. He’s not only knowledgeable, he’s super approachable, and willing to share his expertise.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak and to be part of the program. When it comes to the will to win, I have to reflect on some of the things that really motivated me in training. As a high school freshman, I came across the event by chance. We would try to impress the girls during lunch by doing back flips in the gym. I kept stepping it up, until I ended up on the top level of the bleachers. I back flipped off. When I landed, a hand grabbed my shoulder and the PE teacher/track coach said, “Come with me.”

Following him into his office, I thought I was in trouble. He set me down in the chair, and said he wanted me to come out for track and field, specifically for pole vault. So I went out the first day. He threw the bar up at 8’6” and told me to come down the runway and do whatever I thought I needed to do to get over it.

I had never seen pole vaulting before. The only visual I had was that episode of Tom and Jerry, where they vault against each other at the Olympics. I tried to imitate what I saw on the cartoon, and I guess I did alright because I cleared the bar on the first try. My coach was very excited. He thought that would score at, or possibly win our city meet.

I went home and told my father I was going to the Olympics. He looked at me and laughed, asking “What makes you think you’re so special?”

He explained that there were a hundred kids at my school who also wanted to go to the Olympics; there were another 12 schools in the district, and 40 schools in the region. And when you get to the state level, there are thousands of athletes who want to be Olympians. So what made me so special?

Photo courtesy of Lawrence Johson

Photo courtesy of Lawrence Johson

Not knowing the answer, I dropped my bags at the door and started running. It was the only thing I knew to do to make myself better. I always ran into challenges like that, and I wanted to step it up as I continued vaulting.

I ran into my first racist situation in the sense that I was approached by people on both sides saying Black people didn’t pole vault, and asking what was I doing in the sport. I turned that around and made a point of proving them wrong. The more I heard this question, the more I aspired to the next level.

From early on, I hated losing. It may seem the opposite, but I was not the best athlete on our team. I was mediocre to bottom, but you could not outwork me. And, I had a deep desire to win. I knew if someone hit the track with more talent than me, in time, I could outwork them and surpass them. That’s what started this incredible workload, where each day I assessed my training. Did I complete the workout? The answer was always yes. And my next thought was, if you finish the workout, there are another hundred kids in the state who did so as well.

So what did I need to do to get better?

It broke down all kinds of barriers for me. I never felt like I needed to wait to be great. I wanted to win from the very start. I also knew that it would take work to get it done.

So my freshman year in high school, I finished at 12’6”, and was eyeing the twins from our region who jumped 13’. I was fired up to compete against them. The next year, I jumped 14’ and was stoked to get to the state meet and break the state record.

Each time these levels stepped up, my focus went to that goal and did not waver. I repeatedly visualized winning the championship, training hard to get there, and knowing that if I showed up to a meet the most prepared, the strongest, fastest, and most focused, I would walk away with the competition set up. It drove me. I trained year round, even though I didn’t have access to a club. We didn’t have camps and events like the whole of our community does now. I had to run and train by doing other sports. It made me a better football player.

I told myself from the start that I was going to hold myself to expectations so high that no one else could have a higher expectation of me than myself. I understood that the one thing I needed to do to hold those high expectations was to learn to deal with loss, not from my parents or from a coach, but from myself.

Once I learned how to deal with loss, to allow it to make me better and use it to motivate me to not be afraid to go after what I want, I began to excel. We fear failure, and the pressure we put on ourselves is that fear of failing. When you eliminate that, you can tell yourself, you know what, if I fail today, it’s only one try, one meet, one competition. I’ll come back stronger next time, and I’ll be on top of this.

But it became the hardest thing to deal with. It is the

biggest challenge I see in athletes nowadays, in terms of setting goals and motivating themselves. They set the bar too low. As a coach, I can never have expectations greater than an athlete has for themself. So we like to say, we will coach you to your ability. If you want to be a state champion, national champion, we’ll coach you. My job is to maintain motivation and support. More important than anything else, it is teaching that it’s okay to fail.

Take your goal and set it as high as you can. The only thing that happens if you don’t get it, is a little disappointment. Once you can deal with that, you can hit it time and again.

When I walked onto campus as a college freshman, I told myself I wanted to win the national championship. I trained for it. Every morning, I walked up the hills of UT’s campus on the balls of my feet, bouncing around and looking crazy. In addition to practice, I went on a jog three times per week. I did any and every thing to improve my training. That attitude, I think, is the strongest thing I can tell anyone to do to help motivate themselves.

Don’t be afraid.

Take the goal; set it high. If you want to be the first Black man to stand on an Olympic podium, the best American athlete ever in the pole vault, set a goal that feels out of reach.

Go get it.

If you fail, your parents will love you. Your coach will be there to support you. But you can always motivate yourself to the next level. Create a higher vision and hold yourself in check. Don’t attend practice and go through the motions. Push yourself each day to grow and improve. Motivation is something that is essential to any level of championship performance, in the sense of training, and also in reminding yourself not to put your competition on a pedestal.

There were times that I stepped on the track, knowing I was in for tough competition. I remember the first couple of times jumping with Sergey (Bubka) and Maksim (Tarasov). They were having a hot season, jumping 5.90 and 6 meters almost every competition. I had to stay galvanized to beat them, otherwise I would have thought they were unbeatable. I was happy to be there competing. That level of focus should accompany each athlete at every stage of the game. It leads to greater performances.

What you said is fantastic. I do believe that a lot of athletes fear losing. Lawrence is providing a road map. If you train hard to be excellent, it does not matter where you start. Everyone begins at a different level. The destination is what we make of it. Lawrence took it all the way to the highest places, multiple times.

LoJo: Thank you. If I could say one more thing on the failure aspect, sitting back now, looking at my career, it’s one thing to go through it. But, I don’t really remember the failures. There are times you know you fell short, but that is not what sticks in your memory. What stays are the moments you came through.

Growing up in Raleigh, it was sort of interesting to see where pole vault was in communities of color. How

I don’t really remember the failures. There are times you know you fell short, but that is not what sticks in your memory. What stays are the moments you came through.

can we get pole vault into the Black communities and expose it to more athletes?

LoJo: I have thought about this quite a bit. One of the first challenges is access to poles. You can sprint fast and jump high, but without a succession of poles, you are going to have a hard time.

I was fortunate in that while I began at an inner city school, we moved and I graduated from Great Bridge High School, which had more resources. They were able to pick up more poles to get me to 16’, which was my personal best up until two weeks before our regional championship. What changed was that I developed a relationship with Steve Chappell and UCS, and they basically took care of me from there. Spirit sent me poles I could actually jump on, and I went from 16’ to 17’6 at the state meet, due to the poles.

When I do have the opportunity to go into various communities, there is excitement for the event. There’s just not a push there because the school knows that either they or you will have to buy poles and equipment, and keep it up to date.

Then there are pole vault clubs, which have another cost of entry. We do try to reach out to athletes in the community here, and bring them in for free. We do what we can to help them not just train, but compete. Until this is resolved, those types of challenges in inner city communities and communities of color will persist.

My school tends to neglect cross country and track and pays more attention to the sports more people come to. But we have some athletes with amazing potential, and I don’t know how to ask the school to help us. Our pole selection goes from an 11’120 to a 13’ 145. The beginners can’t even use the smallest pole, and I don’t know how to talk to the school about this issue.

LoJo: That’s something that’s a problem all across the U.S. Track and field is not a revenue sport, so it’s going to be an uphill battle. Football sells tickets and brings in spectators. The athletic administration is making money. It wasn’t that way when I came up, and now sports programs are expected to bring in income, which is why the focus goes toward the profitable sports, football, basketball, and baseball.

Now, on the other side of that, there is a way to draw attention to pole vault and get more focus on track and field. A lot of times athletes forget that sport is a form of competitive entertainment, and the more entertaining you are at an event, the more exciting the event becomes. An individual can energize a sport positively or negatively. One of the reasons I loved competing at the Penn Relays is because of the crowd of 40,000 people lined around the stadium. At any point in time, they are watching some of the greatest performances in track and field history, happening on the oval.

But, there were times when I was able to snag their attention. I’d turn to the crowd to start the clap. When it came time to move the bar, I’d walk to the standards and point at 18 feet and ask, do you want 18 feet, or 18’1?

The more we appreciate the entertainment aspect of competition, the more we draw attention to it. You have to create a spark with your administration and in your community. If that is something I can assist with, just reach out, and not to just myself. I am sure there are other athletes who will come in, make a bit of noise, and bring awareness to an event to uplift the sport. I believe that is what vaulters ultimately want to see.

Lawrence, you talked about the difficulties you faced. What was the hardest thing to overcome, and how did you overcome it?

Competitiveness is something you turn on, and it stays on the burner and carries over to every other area of your life. If I speak honestly, the first was learning to not be afraid of failure, and the back half to that was feeling like I had left something out there.

When I took second at the NCAA Championships as a freshman, I was so bummed out that I ran stadium steps from 8 pm until midnight, until my coach came and found me. Not the wisest thing to do.

The other challenge came from being an individual of color. It was something that I felt constantly, and it put me in a place where I felt like I had to win. That was one of the things I loved about pole vault. You walk out, you can win, and nobody can take it away from you when things become more subjective.

You’re a fairly big guy. What size poles did you jump on in Olympic competition? And, are you still writing and playing music? Who is your favorite artist?

LoJo: When I competed professionally, I was 193-196 pounds. I competed on 17 foot poles, 215 and 220. I gripped between 5.0 and 5.15 meters depending on the bar I was going for. As far as music is concerned, it is something that I’ll never be separated from. I do more producing than writing. My family is large, we have five children, and it is hard to find time to get focused to write creatively.

Picking a favorite artist is challenging. I like a lot of the music today, but quite honestly am disconcerted when there’s a profanity or negative influence. Sometimes I find it hard to dial in. When it comes to male vocals, it would be Brian McKnight and Boyz II Men. I love the complexity of the music, and the range and artistry in their voices. On the female side, I had the opportunity to hear Christina Aguilera in person, and the power in her voice blew me away.

Lawrence, thank you for taking the time with us this evening. What you said today is going to resonate with many of our athletes. We look forward to learning more from you in the future. We sincerely appreciate your time. That was awesome!

LoJo: Thank you for having me. It’s been my pleasure.

Once I learned how to deal with loss, to allow it to make me better and use it to motivate me to not

be afraid to go after what I want, I began to excel.

You may enjoy Lawrence’s music on Spotify and iTunes under his artist name, LoZart. His music is funk jazz fusion and R&B.

Photo courtesy of Lawrence Johson