The high jumper wearing the “1” at this year’s Penn Relays began his career in a college cafeteria.

Donald Thomas, a basketball player at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., took up a classmate’s dare that he could not jump 6-feet, 6-inches. They headed to the gym, where Thomas, wearing sneakers and gym shorts, cleared 6-6 on his first try, 6-8 on his second, and 7-feet on jump number three.

“Two days later I was at a meet at Eastern Illinois, and I did 7-3 1/4,” Thomas recalled. “I broke a recod that was set in 1993, and I just stopped.”

Thomas, a 6-foot-2 senior shooting guard who had averaged 14 points and seven rebounds as a junior, also stopped his basketball career right there, three games into his senior season.

In March, Thomas—a graduate student at Auburn after graduating from Lindenwood with a degree in business administration—became an NCAA champion when he cleared 7-7 3/4. He did not miss until the bar had been raised to 7-6 1/2.

“This is a fairy tale or something,” said Thomas, a native of the Bahamas who will represent his country in the high jump in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. “I can’t believe this is happening. My dream now is to win the Olympic gold medal.

“I always knew I could do good at some sport at the pro level, but I never knew it would be track.”

No one did.

When he contacted his cousin Henry Rolle, who is an assistant coach at Auburn, to tell him about his cafeteria challenge, “I asked him what pole he used,” Rolle said. “He was a basketball player with great leaping ability. He still doesn’t know that a track goes around in a circle.”

Thomas said he had high-jumped only once before his cafeteria challenge, during intramurals in high school in Freeport. He used the Fosbury Flop “because I watched other people do it and didn’t think it was that hard.”

His current jumps coach at Auburn is Jerry Clayton, who also coached 1996 Olympic champion and American record holder Charles Austin (7-10 1/2).

“Donald has the same jumping ability, but he has to do it in big competitions," Clayton said. “I am slowly having him do some things. I have had guys go 6-6, 6-8 in their first jumps, but not seven feet.”

After Penn, and then the SEC and NCAA championship meets, Thomas will compete in the Pan-Am Games in Brazil and the World Championships in Japan.

Then the Olympics, and then...well, it won’t be in the NBA.

by Frank Bertucci