“Jim Murray-esque” is a column by Sean Campbell that highlights all facets of USC athletics in the style of former Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray.
Starting these things is always the hardest part, some would say.
Even the great Jim Murray — who this column is inspired by — wrote his first column for the Los Angeles Times spewing hot takes because he felt the need to introduce himself. While I may agree with his apathy for the “eight-point touchdown,” what we now just call a two-point conversion, it was a lot simpler for me.
I just looked backwards, literally.
Here at USC, it is not uncommon to see people so famous it feels like you are living in a myth. Like you are a mere mortal walking among gods, or a freshman journalism major hoping Olivia Rodrigo’s one on-campus appearance a year happens to be in your WRIT-150 section. I know I’m not the only one…
If Ezra Frech was a god, it wouldn’t surprise me. When he enters the room of my 10 a.m. class on the science behind performance-enhancing drugs and sits behind me, it is like when a little kid tries to walk past the window he just broke with his bat and baseball in hand.
“I feel definitely proud of what I have accomplished, but I don’t feel massively different from every other 19 year old,” Frech told me in an interview.
Humble and dominant? You can’t fool me, buster. The jig is up. When you learn how to fly, I’ll tell them “I told you so.”
On Frech’s first day back from his trip to Paris, we were learning about how athletes can avoid PED testing through urination, cycling and more. When our professor called on him, he spoke like someone who had been there, at the Olympics, watching it all play out.
That’s because he was.
Instead of missing class for being lazy or going out with friends or having “one of those rough mornings” after a late Thursday night, he was winning two Paralympic gold medals. I guess next time I’ll only hit the snooze button three times and wake up at least 15 minutes before class. Thanks for the wake up call, jerk.
As much as Ancient-Greek Olympians were epicly barbaric as they slashed their foes, Frech was calm, cool and dominant as he stared down the 1.94-meter high bar in Paris on September 3. Already owning the high jump world record in the T63 division — where athletes with a single leg, above the knee amputation run with a prosthesis — at 1.97 meters, the hawk got the poor, frail mouse.
The bar didn’t have a chance of taking Frech down, and neither did his competitors. The next closest jumper, Sharad Kumar of India, jumped a personal-record 1.88 meters.
And, unlike the heroes of the Roman Colosseum, he only needed one leg to reach greatness.
Born with his lower left leg curved upwards, Frech might not have looked like Steve Rogers, but he could sure run faster than good old Cap — even after the super-soldier serum.
Unlike many of his competitors in the T63 division, Frech was born with another disability, only having one finger on his left side — later two after a transplant surgery, allowing him to pick things up. But that “doesn’t really make much of a difference” he said, outside of an adjustment in his weight training program.
Is there anything this guy can’t do?
When powerlifting icon Eddie Hall did the impossible and deadlifted 500 kilograms — for us Americans, just over 1,100 pounds — nobody asked him to walk a mile, let alone run it.
The British beast was the pinnacle of one facet of human capability. In Paris, Frech didn’t just climb the peak of one summit in the mountain range of human achievement, he climbed two, and he didn’t make it look very hard.
At his own pinnacle, Frech had the audacity to say, to the whole class, that he was a “novice” at the 100-meter dash — an event he earned the T63-division Gold Medal in with a time of 12.06 seconds. He only started training for the event less than two months before he was the best in the world.
Are you kidding me? It would take me 12.05 seconds to get up out of the chair I am sitting in right now to start the race — and I train for that every day.
As a novice at many things myself, I’m calling B.S.
My golf swing is like the for-film ones the producers of Caddyshack gave their actors — god awful. On a good day, I can play around bogey golf — somewhat respectable. But, if I somehow ended up in a tournament with the corpse of Ben Hogan and his skeleton could only use wooden children’s clubs, I would get smoked, no doubt.
I hate to break it to you man, but novices win gold medals made of chocolate, not real, California gold — that’s the one thing I am an expert in. I would suggest melting the “medal” to see for yourself, the foil complements the sweetness well I’ve heard.
“Jim Murray-esque” runs every Thursday.