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Cool-hand Tom Pappas hopes to turn ice into gold in Athens

by Mike Gibson

Four figures stand alone in the middle of the University of Tennessee’s rain-spotted Tom Black Track on a Tuesday afternoon. Three of them, Kip Janvrin, Brian Brophy and Vince Anderson, are athletic-looking men in their 30s and 40s, ex-jock types, ball-capped, wearing T-shirts that sprout beefy forearms, shorts on sturdy legs.

But the most striking member of the group, and the evident focal point of the other men’s attentions, is the youngest, 27-year-old Tom Pappas—6’5, 210 pounds, blonde hair matted to his skull like a devotional cap, poised at the end of a runway as a prelude to a practice long jump. He looks like a Greek statue—muscles taut even in repose, his back etched like a topographical relief map, thigh muscles that seem so long and sweeping and supple they must surely have been wrought by a gifted sculptor.

Hell, Pappas is almost literally a Greek statue—fourth-generation descendant of an outcast boy named Athanasios who sailed across the ocean alone from Athens to New York City more than 100 years ago. But that’s another story. Right now, he’s simply a superbly trained athlete, a thoroughbred preparing for the most elusive honor in sports—winning the Olympic decathlon, and by extension the title of the World’s Greatest Athlete.

There’s no small irony in the fact that the man who is one of the favorites to win that honor still toils in relative anonymity, especially in his adopted city. No Wheaties boxes for this guy—at least not yet—and certainly no big sports-page headlines in a town where games that don’t involve either balls or big engines hold little purchase with the average fan.

But his lack of renown isn’t really surprising, because Pappas’ demeanor is low-key to a fault, his instinct for drawing attention to himself non-existent. “Some big athletes like to make an entrance, a big scene,” says fellow former UT decathlete Stephen Harris. “Tom is the opposite. He prefers it when you hardly know he’s there.”

A man of shrouded intensities, Pappas is truly an enigma to observers who wonder whence comes the drive that has pushed him to the brink of greatness. And he is very close to great, if he isn’t there already. In a sport that tests an athlete’s every resource—with three running events, three throwing events, three jumping events plus the hybrid discipline of the 110 meter hurdles—he is a world champion, a three-time American champion, and a collegiate record holder. Yet he still has cause to believe his best scores are ahead of him.

To win this month in Athens, and lay inarguable claim to greatness, he will have to outmuscle and outwill a number of powerful rivals, the most dangerous of the lot being Roman Sebrle, a Czech who is the sport’s world record holder with an astonishing 9,026-point decathlon in 2001; he and Pappas have split their last four head-to-head meetings.

Also a threat, teammate Bryan Clay upset Pappas in the recent U.S. Olympic trials in Sacramento, Cal., a contest that some track and field observers saw as a sizable chink in Pappas’ armor, his record against American competition having been otherwise flawless in recent years.

But his coaches say the trials offered only a hint of what Pappas can do when the decathlon begins in late August. “In his mind, the trials were something he had to go through to get to the Games,” says Janvrin during a break, himself a former Olympian who still managed a respectable finish in the Sacramento trials at the age of 39. “He wasn’t peaking for the trials; he was there for business. ‘I’m going to make the team, and if I win, that’s great.’ Some of his practices since then have been phenomenal. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t throw up a really good score in Athens.”

Pappas sets for his last long jump attempt of the afternoon session. Janvrin and Anderson inundate him with coachspeak:

“You’re punting with your left foot, Tom. We don’t want you to punt.... We want you to block it, max high. Flush up.... Quit thinking about the take-off leg and think about the lead foot....”

When it seems, at last, that Tom’s rangy form can absorb not even one more instruction, he goes, sets off down the runway with his impossibly long-legged stride, hits the take-off board on one foot and launches himself more than 25 feet through the air, landing heels-first in a violent, sandy wake. Then he stands, brushes the caked sand from his arms and legs and mutters, in a rare moment of verbalized emotion, “That was terrible.”

“Why did you think that was terrible? Because you were tired?” Janvrin asks. “Don’t confuse ‘tired’ with ‘terrible.’ That was a pretty good jump, I thought.”

By Pappas’ standards, “pretty good” is pretty far; his personal best in the event is more than 26 feet, a length that might bode well for a career as a long-jump specialist had he not chosen to divide his energies among the decathlon’s 10 incongruously demanding events.

A high jumper and sometime long jumper in high school, Pappas took to decathlon training as a freshman at Lane Community College in his home state of Oregon, where he would go on to set a school record as well as finish first in the USA Track and Field (USATF) Jr. Championships in his second and final year.

It was at the 1996 USATF Jr. championships at Mt. Sac Jr. College in California that UT head track coach Bill Webb first saw Pappas, then a gangly 178-pounder, and was impressed with his prowess in the jumping events.

“He was a good hurdler, high jumper and vaulter,” Webb remembers. “I place a high priority on those events. They show that you have speed, coordination, and the ability to learn a skill. If he’s good at those, I thought, he can be a very good decathlete. I just had no idea how good.”

Webb had coached a succession of outstanding decathletes at UT, including Brophy, the 1991 NCAA champion, and Olympian Aric Long. He saw similar potential in Pappas, and recruited him to Tennessee.

“On my recruiting visit, I had a real good time here,” Pappas says. “I liked the track and the facilities, got along with the athletes. More than anything, it felt like home. That made it easier, because it was a big step for me, coming all the way from Oregon and not knowing anyone.”

Despite some nagging injuries, Pappas had a strong year in 1997, his first at the major college level, winning a Southeastern Conference Decathlon championship. But in ‘98, he was forced to redshirt when a surgery to relieve tendonitis in his knee took longer than anticipated to heal.

“It was hard on me mentally more than anything,” Pappas says. “I felt like I had something to prove, that I was ready for a big score, and not being able to do it was frustrating.

“They said it would take five or six weeks to recover, and it ended up taking a year. I kept wondering ‘Is it ever going to heal? Am I ever going to get back where I was?’”

Perhaps it was the impetus of those welling frustrations that finally propelled Pappas to the top of his sport. Says Webb, “I saw Tom make great progress that year, despite his injury. That’s about the time I started knowing he could be something special.”

Healthy and primed in 1999, his last year of college eligibility, Pappas exploded. He crossed the 8,000 point barrier for the first time with an 8,463 score at a meet in Tucson, Ariz. He won the NCAA Outdoor decathlon, and placed second at the USATF open outdoor championships.

Turning professional (his sponsors now include Nike and the WGA Decathlon Club, based in Missouri), Pappas took fifth place at the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, Australia. In his next 13 competitions, he would place no worse than third—and that only once, at a meet in Brisbane in 2001. In 2003, he was nearly unstoppable, winning the U.S. outdoor championship in Palo Alto with a personal best of 8,784, and then a world outdoor championship, beating rival Sebrle with an 8,750 in Paris.

Playing cards is Pappas’ favorite pastime, Hearts and Spades and especially a game called Texas Hold ‘Em. He plays poker the same way he plays his chosen sport—or the same way he plays golf, for that matter, his other chief avocation—with studious urgency, and a sense of mission.

“He has a great understanding of a lot of different card games, and a great memory of what cards have been played,” Janvrin says. “And he doesn’t like to lose.

“That intelligence and willingness to learn were what impressed me with Tom as a decathlete. We competed in the Sydney Olympics together, and he was always asking a lot of questions about competing and training. He had that passion to seek knowledge wherever he could find it, even though he was already a better decathlete than I was.”

But there’s a larger symbolism in Pappas’ love of poker, one often alluded to by journalists; Pappas has the quintessential poker face, a demeanor so staid that it’s sometimes mistaken for apathy, or even somnolence. Webb, though he’s known Pappas for 10 years now, readily admits that, “Tom is a hard read. I don’t think you’ll ever see him run around and thump his chest.”

Last February, Sports Illustrated ran an eight-page story on Pappas—or, to be more specific, on Pappas’ background, because the athlete himself was directly quoted only one time in the entire spread, most of which dealt with his colorful family history.

What emerged was fascinating, if somewhat sensationalist, a sort of Greco-Godfather epic sans the criminal element, a portrait of four generations of fiery and sometimes hard-living Greeks, beginning with Athanasios Pantazis, Pappas’ great-grandfather who came alone from Athens to New York City when he was scarcely 10 years of age.

The story suggested that perhaps Tom was the first male member of the clan (Pantazis changed his name to Pappas as an adult) to harness and channel the tempestuous energies that had driven his father and grandfathers to scrap and claw their way through street brawls, professional wrestling rings, drag-races, crippling accidents and illnesses to stake out their own little corner of the American dream.

Pappas says he liked the article, though he felt writer Gary Smith occasionally went overboard in characterizing his apparent lack of emotion. (At one point, Smith speculates that Pappas’s coaches “can’t tell, looking at [their] man just before the starting gun fires, whether he’s getting ready to go to war... or go to bed.”)

“The only thing I thought was off was the portrayal of me as having no emotions...” Pappas says. “I think I’m as emotional as anyone. My appearance just doesn’t happen to reflect that.”

Friends say the evidence of Pappas’s ferocious inner competitor is not hard to find, if you know where to look. He grew up on a communal farm in Oregon, with a group of seven other boys—including brothers Paul and William, both of whom went on to become accomplished decathletes—who sought endlessly to best one another in athletic contests of every sort.

Those ingrained competitive instincts were later manifest in his scholastic sporting endeavors, where Pappas favored individual challenges over team sports. (A wrestler as well as a track-man through much of high school, Tom reportedly entered and won the most important match of his career wearing a homemade “cast” on a broken hand.)

“Consider the sports he’s chosen to play throughout his life,” says UT pole vaulting coach Jim Bemiller. “He picks tough sports, sports where you have to motivate yourself, because you’re not going to be getting a lot of attention. He’s not trying to figure out what’s popular; he’s trying to figure out what’s most challenging.”

Those aspects of his nature come into sharper focus when one sets aside any false notions that competitive spirit is only expressed through histrionics. Though he rarely acts out, Pappas exudes an intensity of purpose whenever he steps on the track or enters a room, a mute, thoughtful intensity that nonetheless courses palpably through his long, ruggedly angular frame. Says Bemiller, “It’s like an old-fashioned movie star compared to one of the new ones. Tom is more like a Gary Cooper, someone who said more without saying anything at all.”

Friends also say Pappas has a lighter side, too, a fondness for goofy jokes and Farrelly Brothers movies and forgotten pop songs that becomes plain once you get past the guardedness of his default setting. “When you get to know him, which is usually pretty quickly, there’s not much that he holds back,” says former UT pole vaulter Tim O’Hare, who roomed with Pappas on and off for several years.

But even to those in his inner circle, Pappas’ sense of urgency can be daunting. Janvrin likens his pre-Olympic mindset to that of basketball great Michael Jordan during a play-off run—focused to the point of tunnel vision. “Very few people can concentrate like that,” Janvrin says.

“I know what it means when Tom is like this. I’ve gone out there at times where I could joke with him and screw around at practice. But when I go out on the field right now, all I have to do is look in his eyes, and I know this isn’t one of those times.”

It’s just past 2 p.m. on a miserable, sweltering Sunday. Pappas’ coaches aren’t even at the track yet, but his grey T-shirt is already turned black with sweat. By the time Brophy arrives and begins pulling the cover off the foam rubber pad that sits behind the cross-bar apparatus, he’s practicing his hand placement and take-off with a 16-foot fiberglass pole.

“Did you do anything exciting on your Saturday?” Brophy asks. His conversations with Tom often seem spare, but it’s an easy spareness rather than an awkward one, as if the two men are bound in some rare communicative synergy.

“Nope,” Pappas answers.

“Me neither. I cleaned my garage,” says Brophy.

One could make a case that Sunday is the most important day of Pappas’ training week, in that (a.) it is his pole-vault day, the day for practicing the most technically demanding of the decathlon’s disciplines, and (b.) it is 1,500 meter day, the day for Tom to work out more of the bugs in what has traditionally been his weakest event.

The 1,500 meter run is not only his weakest event; it is the one in which he is liable to lose the most points to his rival Sebrle, who excels at it; their personal bests are a fairly daunting 14 seconds apart, in the Czech’s favor. “To win at the Games, I think I need to keep [the difference] under 10 seconds,” Pappas admits.

If he can minimize his losses in the 1,500, Pappas may have an edge over Sebrle. His personal bests are higher in four of the nine remaining events; in a fifth, the pole vault, they have both achieved a highwater of 5.2 meters, but Pappas has been more consistent.

That Sebrle is the world record holder, and has been dominant internationally since 1996 (Pappas didn’t win an international competition until 2002) isn’t a concern, he says. “What I learned from the 2000 Olympics is that those guys like Roman are physically the same as me,” Pappas says. “They’re not any better. I was a little overwhelmed before, and now that I’ve gone and competed against them, I’m much more confident.”

Along with Sebrle, Pappas looks for his stiffest competition to come from Dmitri Karpov, a 23-year-old giant from Kazachstan, and from fellow American Bryan Clay, the man who upset him in Sacramento.

“I was more disappointed with my score and with how I competed than with how I placed,” Pappas says of the trials, where he was far off his personal bests in most of the events. “How I finished really wasn’t that important. What’s important now is that my fitness level is as good as it’s ever been, and my confidence is high.”

For the afternoon, Tom executes 10 pole vaults, including one that appears tantalizingly close to his personal best. Then he sets himself for 1,500 practice, which comes today in the form of two separately timed 750-meter bursts.

“I know you’re feeling good, Tom, but I want you to hold back a little on these runs,” Brophy says as his decathlete prepares for the first practice leg. Minutes later, he sees just how good Pappas feels, when both of the legs come in faster than his prescribed pace.

“Bastard,” Brophy chuckles to no one in particular as Pappas walks the track to cool down. “He did that on purpose.”

Had he not known any better, he might have imagined he saw the ghost of a smile flicker across that Pappas poker face.

August 12, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 33 © 2004 Metro Pulse