On Lumberjack Sports
Professional coppers and sawyers have perfected skills of a bygone era to turn an occupation into a sport.
By Hank Nuwer
Three months before the 1988 LumberJack World Championships began, I
grew a bushy, long, and positively bestial beard because I thought the
men I’d interview would sport them. I concluded this because nine
years earlier I had visited lumberjacks in western Washington during
the winter of 1979, including some at Camp Grisdale, one of the last
live-in logging camps in America. Several Washingtonian loggers (they
detested the term “lumberjack”) resembled their
19th-century forebears, cultivating beards that made them appear as
hairy as yaks. These men favored shirts made of tick, the material that
covers army-surplus mattresses. “Gimmee” caps promoted
chain-saw manufacturers invariably floated atop their hedges of hair.
Most of the bearded men, come to think of it, were under 45. The
veteran loggers were more conservative, favoring flannel shirts and
cropped hair. Unlike the young bucks, their faces told hard-luck tales.
The vessels in their noses and cheekbones gleamed red and purple
because, as they explained, their blood “thinned out” from
working long days in frosty temperatures. The old timers’ hands I
shook often were gnarled. Some lacked one or more digits. Many had
arthritis, rheumatism and chronic lower back pain; every morning their
spouses or friends helped stuff their feet into steel-toed boots. Frank
Brehmeyer, a fifty-ish superintendent of the camp, understated the
occupational hazards when he spoke with me: “The woods take a lot
out of a guy.”
Nonetheless, Brehmeyer and his underlings never grumbled about the life
they’d chosen. These were tough men who thrived under tough
circumstances. These were tough men who thrived under tough
circumstances. Working in the Olympic Peninsula’s mountain-goat
country with its annual precipitation of 190 inches, loggers accepted
the rain that pelted their faces like spray off a whitecap and made
their clothes soggier than yesterday’s cornflakes. They also
lived with the knowledge that even the strongest and most careful of
them weren’t indestructible. A snapped cable can behead an
unlucky worker. Limbs and chunks of bark that weigh hundreds of pounds
can mash hard hats and pulverize brains.
Frank Brehmeyer maintained that the Good Lord “screwed up”
when He made the Olympic Peninsula: “That’s why He covered
it with all these trees.” The loggers I met who worked the
peninsula’s steep slopes routinely started straight down between
their toes for 700 feet. Tenderfeet, therefore, learned to rid
themselves of acrophobia, or found employment in lowland states. The
crusty Brehmeyer would tell intimidated rookies to shit their mouths
before they deprived the birds of flies.
Living in the camp’s incestuous tract housing some 40 minutes
from Aberdeen—the nearest town via a pothole-marked
road—caused the men of Camp Grisdale to grow clannish. They
consigned nonloggers to membership in “The 90-10 Club,”
since, in their opinion, 90 percent of the American public never
ventured more than 10 feet off a road. Brehmeyer said that if a
stranger insulted any one of them in a logger’s bar, the fight
wouldn’t commence until everyone drew lots to see who won the
first poke. He rolled his eyes when asked how he and his workers felt
about the entrance of female loggers into the profession. I had posed
the question not knowing that a “lumberjill” had accused a
company foreman of making sexual advances the previous year, resulting
in a strike that idled Camp Grisdale for months. “A logging camp
has always been a place where men are men, and the women are damn glad
of it,” said Brehmeyer.
* * *
The Lumberjack World Championships traditionally are held on the final
Sunday in July. They have been held in Hayward, Wisconsin, since 1960,
when a local entrepreneur named Toney Wise bid $2,000 for the
then-failing Idaho events. He built what he called the
“Lumberjack Bowl” on the site of a Lake Hayward bay that
held cut logs during the town’s lawless timber boom. Wise, too,
has since gone bankrupt, but the championships were kept alive by a
Hayward-based foundation.
Last summer I attended this “Olympics of the Forest,” as
locals term the world championships, to watch the lumberjack sports
descended from “King of the Forest” competitions of the
19th century. Then and now, the purpose of these events was to
determine the best all-around lumberjack in camp. I had looked forward
to watching contemporary lumberjacks demonstrate their mastery of axes
and crosscut saws, tools that gradually became obsolete in everyday
logging after Andreas Stihl invented a crosscutting chain saw in 1926.
The throck-throck-throck sounds accompanying the chopping events
soothed me. In contrast, back at Camp Grisdale, the power saws emitted
eardrum-threatening screams. The loggers operating them were skilled,
but nonetheless, I couldn’t see spending three or four days
watching them. At the camp, I regretted the fact that million-dollar
cable-bearing machines had replaced horse-drawn skidders; although if I
owned a lumber company, I have no doubt which method I’d prefer
to drag away logs.
As it turned out, my experiences of a decade ago didn’t prepare
me at all for what I was to see in Hayward. The males among the 102
competitors on hand for the four-day competition resembled health spa
employees, not working loggers. These few with deflated whitewalls
under their tank tops looked sloppy compared to the trim majority. The
only man under 45 who resembled a fairy-tale woodchopper was 300-poung
Bill Miller from Myrtle Creek, Oregon. “Little
Bill”—a mastodon you wouldn’t dare kill in a fight,
because it might make him mad—looked capable of gnawing the tops
off redwood trees.
The others, judging by their chiseled torsos and powerful glutes, had
patronized weight rooms as well as woodpiles in preparation for the
chopping and sawing events. They might have been Green Bay Packer
linebackers gone AWOL from training camp. Moreover, except for some
Done Johnson-style stubble on the face of Rolin Eslinger, winner of the
1987 All-Around Lumberjack award, few had chin hair. In short,
unless an Amish buggy rode into town, I didn’t fit in. I
wasn’t in town four hours before I skedaddled back to my hotel to
clog the sink with beard hairs.
Perhaps your vision of the old-time lumberjack is
like the romantic cover that N.C. Wyeth painted for a
turn-of-the-century issue of The Country Gentleman magazine. In it a
strapping, handsome man – sans beard, of course – poses
with one booted foot resting atop a freshly cut stump, much as hunters
on safari celebrate lion kills. Wyeth’s ‘jack rests an ax
between his thighs while he gazes dreamily eastward, presumably at the
once-timbered land he has subdued. Behind him to the north and west are
thick woods soon to fall; his unflinching gaze implies that his destiny
is to replace this galaxy of pine with city centers.
Curiously, despite some isolated illustrations such
as Wyeth’s, the 19th-century lumberjack became a creature of myth
and popular literature to the degree that the Western cowboy did.
Novelists of quality generally stayed away from the forest as a
setting, partially because their knowledge of the lumber industry was
nil, and partially because Eastern publishers believed readers rejected
books with lumberjacks as heroes. Norman Maclean, a writer who set his
fictive stories amid mountain pines, failed to sell his thin but
wonderful book, “A River Runs Through It”, until he was 70,
and had retired from his University of Chicago professorship.
“These stories have trees in them,” one publisher
complained to Maclean.
To be sure, lumberjacks weren’t completely
ignored in popular culture, merely underrepresented. Carl Sandburg
romantically described Abraham Lincoln’s log-splitting activities
in “The Prairie Years”, but the author implied that ax-work
was merely something that Lincoln performed as a youth – like
taking 34-mile hikes and digging wells – to build strength for
his real work to come. Then, of course, there was the legend of Paul
Bunyan and Babe, his Blue Ox, but those stories told around the
campfire hardly masqueraded as literature. Even the most gullible North
Woods greenhorn never really swallowed those extravagant tall tales.
The fun thing of telling Bunyan yarns came from exaggerating them for
comic effect. Thus was it said that you could fit 42 ax handles and a
plug of tobacco between the Blue Ox’s horns, and that
Bunyan’s exploits included digging a ditch that turned into the
Columbia River, and catching a tornado in a mason jar. All those
dime-store Westerns, on the other hand, were written to be believed
– or, at least, they were believed – by the public. Readers
readily swallowed whoppers from “out West,” be they tales
of hidden treasure in the Sierra Madre, or rubbish about
“heroic” lawman Wild Bill Hickock or “Robin
Hood” gunman Jesse James.
The life of a shanty boy (as lumberjacks were called
before the 1870’s), like that of a cowboy, was romantic, but only
to a degree. On the one hand, these unwashed forest serfs provided the
lumber for building roads, railroad ties, and the industrial needs of a
bustling nation. These forebears of today’s professional
lumberjacks possessed strength, bravery, endurance and self-reliance.
They were a society unto themselves, possessing their own lingo,
ethics, and values. What they had in common were the dwindling,
monarchial forests, which they both loved and hated. The forests broke
their axes, destroyed their saws, and killed their comrades, but also
challenged them and imprinted a sense of meaning onto their souls.
Photographs surviving in state historical museums show men standing
proudly alongside downed trees whose breadth exceeds their height. The
pines were so tall men fell over backward when they looked at the tops.
A 10-foot log commonly contained more than 2,000 board feet.
Occasionally, just as an everyday cowboy went on to
found a cattle empire, shanty boys occasionally overcame their
circumstances. Robert Dollar saved his 30-dollars-a-month pay as a
woodsman and invested in vast acres of timber. He became a lumber baron
and shipping magnate, the founder of the Dollar Line.
On the other hand, the logging life has always been
dangerous, and lumber barons too often regarded shanty boys as
expendable. During the 19th century, many camp foremen ordered workmen
to break up logjams, a risky maneuver that nearly always resulted in
death or serious injury. The alternative was to use dynamite to blow up
the lead logs, and that meant a loss of valuable timber.
Of course, even routine tasks could be dangerous. A
lumberjack named Jim Noble told me a horror story about his experiences
as a high rigger in Washington state. He and a buddy named Louis were
cutting treetops about a quarter-mile apart from each other. While they
had worked above the canopy of pines, Noble happened to glance over as
the other man made his undercut and moved around the dark backside of a
tall tree for the final cut. Louis had worked his axe only an inch or
so into the wood when a crosswind caught the top of his tree. Before he
could undo his safety line, the tree began to split from the top down,
catching him with his waist strapped around the tree. “As the
tree continued to split, the pressure just mashed everything out of
him,” said Noble. “Finally, the strap and the top both
snapped, and Louis fell to the ground over 90 feet below, while I
watched as if it was in slow motion.”
Since no high rigger can leave a half-sawn top lest
he sign some passing logger’s death warrant, Noble had to finish
“topping out” before sliding to earth and locating
Louis’ remains.
The remoteness of the camp and scarcity of
marriage-minded women made drinking and fighting the recreation of
choice. “We weren’t alcoholics,” one old logger
assured me, “we was just common drunks.” Pants rabbits
(lice), vicious blackflies (the Maine state bird, joked loggers), and
inclement weather also came with the profession. Jim Noble professed
that he never knew cold weather in his native Missouri to be like
Washington state’s. It was so cold, he said, that one early
winter when geese flew overhead, “they just froze right in the
air, they hung there ‘til next June when the sun thawed them out,
and they just continued on their way. Their wings never missed a
beat.”
Perhaps the most disagreeable thing about being a
lumberjack was the end result of doing the best work he knew how. At
the end of every job, the once-spectacular scenery he had invaded was
reduced to a clear-cut vision of the apocalypse. The lumber outfits
classified timber as a renewable resource, but once a forest was
harvested, the land remained blighted for years, even with the best-run
reforestation programs.
The day after I cut my beard, I jogged along a dirt
road at dawn in the high country north of Hayward. Just when I’d
managed to attain that nice rhythm where everyday problems no longer
clouded my mind, I came around a bend in the pine-lined road, and
pulled up short. Dead ahead, several hundred clear-cut acres blighted
the land, looking like a preview of Armageddon. While I watched a
woodpecker tattoo a lone dead pine with its beak, the irony tattooed
me: These athletes loved forests so much that they had perfected sawing
and chopping skills which everyday loggers couldn’t match. But in
competitions such as this one in Hayward, lumberjacks reduced healthy
trees to sawdust and pulpwood. The desecrated mountain reminded me that
the lumberjacks and I were involved in a paradoxical situation. Our
strong love for the environment conflicted with our passion for sport.
I love the unspoiled wilderness of northeastern Montana; yet I dream of
building a log cabin along the Flathead River. Similarly, the shattered
wood lining the dock after lumberjack events disturbs that part of me
that despises spoilage. Nonetheless, the historian in me applauds the
preservation of skills that otherwise would go the way of vanished
specialties such as harpooning. Rolin Eslinger said that the lumberjack
events have an important secondary purpose. “We’re
preserving our American heritage,” he assured me.
In comparison to well-paid professional football
players, lumberjacks are the paupers of the sports world. Only the top
U.S. competitors such as Oregonian Mel Lentz and his pal Eslinger made
$30,000 in a good year. In addition, they incur the expense of
traveling to as many as 50 events a year in such far-flung outposts as
New Zealand, Australia, Oregon, and Hayward, Wisconsin. Because
they’re eager to beef up purses, most professional lumberjacks
don’t display an allergic reaction to reporters’ notebooks,
tape recorders, or cameras. In addition, because lumberjacks just
support their families through some sort of day job – tree
climbing, scrap dealing, carpentry, teaching, driving a bakery truck,
and working for the telephone company – they don’t develop
prima donna tendencies. Or, if they do, they conceal them.
“Nobody is out to get anybody else in this sport,” said a
lumberjack Don Barrett, who is so laid back he wears surfing jams in
his events. “I never liked that kind of killer attitude, and I
guess that’s why I never went out for football.”
The Hayward championships twice have been televised
by ESPN, but that isn’t enough fame to earn lumberjacks a
fortune. Even the winner of the All-Around Lumberjack award can expect
to leave Wisconsin with a paltry $2,000 purse. “Believe me,
there’s times when I say to myself, ‘nothing is ever going
to come of this,’” a competitor named Mike Sullivan told
me. Mosquitoes, drawn by his keg-of-nails scent after a pre-competition
cutting session, assailed his neck, while he talked lumberjack sports
until long past dark.
Like many professional lumberjacks whose main income
is a workingman’s paycheck, Sullivan’s lifestyle is closer
to that of a struggling artist than it is to that of New
England’s best hope of winning the coveted All-Around Lumberjack
award in ’88. Mike and his wife, Darlene, a telephone
paging-service employee, rent a one-bedroom apartment in Winsted,
Connecticut. Their place barely has enough room for a bed, sofa, and
kitchen table. Mike’s arsenal of saws and axes – enough to
give a burglar a myocardial infraction – makes it seem
claustrophobic. When Sullivan’s neighbors first spotted Mike
practicing ax throwing – an Australian event – “they
were sure he was an ax murderer,” said Darlene.
To save airfare, the Sullivans drove 18 hours to
Hayward in their soup-can-sized car, a long saw wedged between its
bucket seats. The couple nixed staying at the ritzy Telemark Lodge
where several other competitors booked rooms. Instead, they accepted
the hospitality of Paddy Steavenson, a veteran lumberjack who abandoned
his native England after wooing a local woman at the Hayward world
championships. Instead of joining his competitors for a 10-cent java,
home-style baked ham, and corn fritters at the Cook Shanty restaurant,
Mike prefers that Darlene cook the low-cal, low-cholesterol,
carbohydrate-rich noodles that her husband believes give him strength
and improved wind.
Sullivan admitted that his addiction to noodles is
calculated to give him a slight edge on the competition. He knows more
about nutrition, bodybuilding, and aerobic fitness techniques than do
many wellness instructors. Although he’s normally reserved with
strangers, Sullivan seeks out experts in performance enhancement. From
picking the brains of one Ph.D., he learned exactly how far to push
himself in practice sessions before a meet in order to reach his peak
during competitions. Similarly, at the world championships,
Mike’s stern face served as an anti-magnetic field while he
psyched himself up for his events, but he himself looked for
opportunities to talk to veteran lumberjacks such as Gilles Levesque, a
garrulous Canadian champion. Sullivan drained advice from the old
pro’s head the way a hummingbird draws nectar from flowers. In
fact, during the Hayward world championships, I marveled as he cut and
sawed with raw blisters on his hands, incurred because he persuaded
Levesque to teach him the art of bow sawing, an event held only in
Canada and our Eastern Coast. Old-time lumberjacks used bow saws to cut
pulp and small logs.
At six-feet-one, and 215 pounds, possessing black
eyes that look capable of performing laser surgery, Sullivan’s
intensity contrasts sharply with that of most of his competitors. It
doesn’t take a Constantin Stanslavsky to find the reason for the
fire in Sullivan’s insides. He has the motivation of a
once-humbled competitor who has been given a second chance.
When he was 17, the Cincinnati Reds drafted him as a
catcher. Because he was a lowly 12th-round draft pick whose job was
never secure, Sullivan refused to ride the bench when he was hurt.
Eventually he destroyed his throwing arm, killing his career in four
years. He had once played in spring training with George Foster and
even catching Tom Seaver in a game. But those memories insufficiently
compensated him for denied glory.
In 1982, when his supervisor on a road maintenance
job introduced him to lumberjack sports, Sullivan vowed that nothing
would defeat this second athletic career. Ever since, he outworked and
out-studied his competition, hoping dedication could overcome his late
start. The best Americans in the sport, including Mel Lentz,
practically teethed on ax handles. Mel’s father, Merv Lentz, had
been named Hayward’s all-around lumberjack (awarded for total
points) four times from 1967 to 1971. Sullivan’s success in so
few years is unprecedented, and other competitors either admire or
mistrust his ambition.
Mike Sullivan’s quest for greatness in an
unfamiliar sport reminds me of Jack London’s monomaniacal pursuit
of a writing career. My favorite Jack London quotation about how the
great writers struggled for recognition certainly applies to this New
England lumberjack. Both they and he “did such blazing, glorious
work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them. They arrived by
course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager against them.
They arrived because they were Carlyle’s battle-scarred giants
who will not be kept down.”
When Mike Sullivan swings an ax you can picture
fastballs rocketing off his bat. He makes the most of forearms and
wrists that have the strength of twice-hardened steel. He says his
ability to hit a pitched ball now enables him to plunge his ac into the
wood “in the right spot each time,” giving him an edge over
stronger opponents. As a hitter, he learned to hit through the ball to
make it carry farther, and this technique applies to chopping, too.
“You want to drive the ax and cut farther in the wood to make it
split,” Sullivan advised me. “You don’t want little
pieces – little fibers – hanging together.”
Sullivan despises losing as much as he loves
winning. Hence, until lumberjacking becomes more lucrative for him, he
puts up with a grueling schedule that would fell most men. “If
you get blanked you go home with your tail between your legs,” he
told me. “Then you go back to work all that week and work hard to
make some money. I’d love to quit work, man. Right now I leave
work at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon and drive all that
night to get to the next show on Saturday. I work five days a week [as
a tree trimmer]. I have responsibilities; I still got rent.”
Unlike the bulk of his competitors, who regard
lumberjack sports as a hobby, Sullivan treats it as a business, saving
his receipts for tax write-offs. Because he’s serious about his
work, he travels to Australia and New Zealand in the winter to study
under great choppers and sawyers. There, without Darlene along, he
cooks his own noodles. Working overseas builds endurance because
competitors in Australia chop 20 blocks in a single day, compared to
only two or three in America. Because lumberjack sports have been taken
seriously Down Under for about 120 years, Australian and New Zealand
athletes are generally more advanced than those from the United States.
They have monsters such as six-foot-five-inch, 300-pound David Foster
of Tasmania who is both quick and powerful, making the dock tremble 20
feet away when his ax collides with a block. Sullivan says that
American lumberjacks go to New Zealand to apprentice much as young
skiers gravitate towards Austria.
If Mike Sullivan is representative of the highly
conditioned athlete for whom winning purses is essential, his fellow
New Englander Don Quigley illustrates another important persona in
contemporary lumberjack sports: men who compete on an occasional basis
for the love of competition. For Quigley, a meat eater (unlike
Sullivan), a victory has always been a bonus, not the sole goal.
“I’m always happy to make it to Sunday,” he said,
meaning that he survived the eliminating rounds.
The 40-year-old husband and father of two is
Professor Quigley by profession, a faculty member in the University of
New Hampshire’s technical division. He publishes articles on
lumberjacks for specialty magazines such as The American Axeman, and he
has a historian’s perspective on his beloved sport.
A 260-pound giant, Quigley’s topknot is red,
but he’s slow to anger. His warped sense of humor could crack up
a condemned man at a hanging. Both fans and other competitors adore
him.
At the 1987 world championships, after Quigley won
the stock chain saw competition, he drove a van home from Wisconsin,
waving all the way to strangers on the street. He cracked up his two
fellow travelers—especially when they grew giddy from lack of
sleep—by pretending he was king, the passersby his minions.
“Hmm, population 700,” he mused. “That’s 700
more of my loyal subjects who bow down to their world champion.”
Although he’s both a serious scholar and a teacher, Quigley loves
to pull his students’ chains. Kidded once too often about the
poor quality of his blackboard artwork, he retaliated. Now, whenever he
shows the national distribution of trees, he mystifies his class by
drawing a perfect map of the United States freehand. Only he knows that
he’s tracing a faint impression that he had etched on the board
with a key.
In lumberjack competitions, other competitors envy Quigley’s
strength and size, much as he covets Mike Sullivan’s raw athletic
ability. He has some weaknesses in his chopping technique, relying too
much on his upper-body strength. In the underhand block event, he
pushes the ax only a little way over his head instead of extending his
arms the way a Lentz or a Sullivan does. The result is that he looks
less like a chopper and more like a man hacking a porcupine to death. A
friend of Quigley’s confided to me, “We hope Don
doesn’t learn to chop real well, because if he does, he’s
going to beat us every time.”
The professor also relies too much on his upper body
in the two-man crosscut event. Once both sawyers are three-quarters
through the log, and the saw is down around their knees, strength is
secondary to technique. The good sawyers such as Sullivan and Colbert
sink down as they saw. Quigley’s job is to learn to drop his
haunches as the saw moves through the wood, enabling him to get the
most out of his back, shoulder, and leg muscles. “He’s
always neck and neck with competitors for the first three quarters, but
invariably he lets up near the bottom,” said Dick Slingerland,
the craftsman who makes Quigley’s saws by hand.
One of the lessons this sport teaches is humility.
Many muscle-bound men come to Hayward, thinking they’ll give the
spectators a thrill. Under the tent on registration day, their bunched
muscles took better in tank tops than do those of the geezers in their
40s. But invariably a veteran’s poise and savvy help him qualify
on the dock, while the youngsters must either head back home or pay to
see the rest of the world championships from the bleachers. In this
sport, technique, timing, and a lifetime of practicing pay off in wins.
An axiom often voiced here is that a chopper reaches his prime at 35.
During the qualifying rounds in Hayward, I watched
amazed as many a rookie axman—some of them the most powerful men
on the dock—continued to chop a full 60 or 70 seconds after the
last veteran had set down his ax. Even more humiliating, while the
greenhorn was wishing he could massage his aching lungs, old-timers
wandered up to assess his block. With not more than a second’s
studied glare at the wood carcass, these veterans analyzed the
performance.
The veterans study their own blocks, too, anxious to
gain even a hundredth of a second. The smart novice pays attention. The
difference between first place and second is often measured in
fractions of seconds. The difference between qualifying and elimination
is usually a second or two. The best compliment one chopper can give
another is to tell him the block of wood he’s cut now looks and
feels like a baby’s bottom.
The novice chopper is easily spotted at lumberjack events. He’s
the angry young man who takes out his frustration on a block of wood.
Invariably, the results are misplaced hits and sorry times. Every
would-be chopper needs to learn how to pull through the wood the same
way a golfer pulls through a ball. The comparison between chopping and
golf doesn’t end there. Both the ax and the club need to be
pulled back so that the leg muscles—the strongest muscles in the
body—are into each swing. In the standing block, for example, the
lumberjacks who have a good rhythm and fluid motion to their swing
invariably manage to qualify because their placement is perfect. Those
who try to overpower the wood have a herky-jerky rhythm when their axes
collide with the wood. The premise behind all chopping events is
simple: A chopper needs to hit in exactly the same spot each time to
make a smooth cut. The smoother the cut, the faster the ax goes through
the block.
Rookies generally try to win the chopping event the
way they’d try to win a 100-yard dash. Going full throttle, they
try to take an ax and hit as hard as they can for as fast as they can.
Worse, these men sometimes get hurt when they’ve drawn a
knot-ridden piece of wood that a veteran would shrug off as unhittable.
Because they end to go beyond their
capabilities—“over-revving” Sullivan calls
it—and try to race the men on either side of them, novices
sometimes skip the ax off a knot, ruining their axes and taking divots
out of their legs. In time, the neophyte learns that he’s not
capable of making 30 hits in 25 seconds, and for the time accepts his
limitations, making, say, a respectable 35 hits in 40 seconds. Rather
than hit blindly, experienced axmen make a decision with every swing of
the ax.
Sunday is the Lord’s Day, and here in Hayward,
He apparently wasn’t going to share much glory with Mike Sullivan
and Don Quigley.
Only one event went right for Sullivan on Sunday at the world
championships. As expected, he and Colbert beat all opponents in the
two-man crosscut event—including the Quigley-Dolliver duo and
their blue-chalked log—with a sizzling 7.6 cut. Sullivan’s
win ruined Quigley’s day. Although the professor had joked that
his chances of winning were nil, he hoped that he and Dolliver could
win if they drew the best log. After the event, he smiled and joked
with his always the same, win or lose,” said Barrett.
Unconvinced, I asked Quigley if his perpetual grin might only serve as
a protective mask. “My family has a history of ulcers,” he
admitted. “I have one.”
Mike Sullivan’s countenance became grimmer as
the day rolled on, and it became evident that he had lost the coveted
all-around trophy. He refused to consider my premise that blistering
his hands with the bow saw might have hurt him. He blamed the wood
instead, and credited his opponents’ skills for his loses. Melvin
Lentz, swinging his ax like a pileated woodpecker on a rampage, set
anew world record in the standing chop, easily whipping Sullivan. The
one-man crosscut event went no better for Sullivan. Bill Miller’s
saw shot through a pane of ice, leaving the field behind. When the
final tallies ended, Sullivan found himself in a disappointing tie for
third with young Matt Bush in overall points, behind Mark Etcheberry of
Nevada and the champion, Lentz, who surpassed his father by winning a
fifth all-around title.
The handshakes Sullivan and Quigley gave their
betters were genuine, but defeat made the long trip back to New England
even longer. Six months after the world championships, when I phoned
Don Quigley to wish him a happy new year, his wife told me he
wasn’t home. She said her weekend warrior lumberjack had decided
to compete in New Zealand over the winter. “Mike Sullivan was
already over there,” said Gloria Quigley, “and Don hoped he
might run into him.”
I thanked her and hung up, hoping I’d hidden
my shock. Next thing you know, I though, old Quigley will give up
steamship rounds of beef and ask Mike Sullivan for his cooked noodles
recipe.