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You're the top Fifty years later, we're still awed by Hillary and NorgayPosted: Wednesday May 28, 2003 12:48 PM
It wasn't just that Annika Sorenstam was a woman going up against men that so captivated us last week. No, much of it was simply that she was an attractive underdog fighting the big guys, no less than Gonzaga or Valparaiso taking on the same old major conference gorillas in the NCAAs. So much of the unexpected has gone out of sport -- the charming surprises that used to pop up when everything wasn't so organized and scouted and seeded and regulated. Exactly 50 years ago, for example, nobody knew that a couple of completely unknown men were huddled in a tent at an elevation of some 29,000 feet, preparing to attempt the ultimate in human kind's challenge against his planet. And they succeeded, when at 11:30 Mount Everest time on the morning of May 29, 1953, first Edmund Hillary and then Tenzing Norgay ascended to the summit of the world, completing what was surely the grandest athletic achievement of our time. Today, they'd have clothing contracts, movie and book deals, their every move would be broadcast on satellite television -- and we would have been hearing about the plans for so long that it would all be anti-climactic. As it was, the Sherpa and the Kiwi just took a few snap shots and found their way back down the mountain. Eventually, they came across some teammates, and Hillary, his smile radiating above his great lantern jaw, merely exclaimed: "Well, we knocked the bastard off." So ended the Heroic Age. But who, in 1953, would ever have imagined that in only 16 more years, two other men would walk a settled surface some quarter of a million miles above Everest? Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were certainly no less accomplished or brave than had been Hillary and Norgay, but especially in the context of Everest, what Armstrong said so eloquently when first he trod upon the moon was so very apt: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Because Hillary's last step up had been huge -- the symbolic foot upon the throat of planet earth by its ruling inhabitants -- Armstrong's step upon the moon was rather more the footprint of technology, the same sort of extraordinary advance that has allowed so many hundreds of adventurers to scale Everest in recent years that the upper reaches now have a litter problem. None of that, however, can ever diminish what Hillary and Norgay did 50 years past, and while Norgay has long since died, Hillary remains, a hale 83 years old. Just as important, though he changed the mountain forever, it changed him not at all. He has been knighted and his face is on the New Zealand five-dollar bill, so that talking to him feels a bit like chatting with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello -- but that is only in the eye of the beholder. There is no artifice or pretension to the man who introduces himself as Ed Hillary, who still lists his telephone number in the directory, who lives in a pleasant house in the Auckland suburbs -- if appropriately high on a hill. No, he was just, as he calls himself, "a reader and a dreamer" of a boy, who had good lungs and the good luck to be in the right place when two other climbers had to turn back, only 300 feet shy of the top. So it fell to him to go up, to stand closer to the sun and the moon than anyone ever had before. But what Edmund Hillary did 50 years ago Thursday changed us all, stretched us all, improved us all. Why? Because he was there, so were we. Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.
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