At any track meet, high jumpers appear curiously out of place, interlopers. Usually tall and angular, they resemble skitterish, ungainly birds, which alone in this aviary no longer possess the power of flight. While others all about them soar and flash by, the high jumpers only preen and stretch and nest. They are known to be a quiet and introverted sort, as lazy at practice as they are inconsistent in competition.

From their improvised little pallets, they rise but rarely to pare off their sweat suits and address the distant bar. Facing it so still, heads cocked, it seems they must be listening for some unseen predator. Dwight Stones, the highest jumper of all time, may twitch uncontrollably in this pose, reacting to the caffeine in his body, from an over-the-counter painkiller he takes for his chronically weak ankles. Jumpers are allowed but two minutes to break this trance, and surely the time limit is not for the convenience of the meet or the fans, but is a favor to the jumpers. Were they not forced to move toward the bar, it is likely that most would stand there and commune with the proposition forever. It is, after all, insane to think: Me, leap over Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and not disturb a hair on his head? But, at last, some stir. Some fidget. Some go through ritual motions, designed to overcome the dreadful inertia. Failure looms, and it is manifest: the bar clattering to the earth for all to see.

High jumping is one of the most primitive of athletic endeavors, and now is a discipline more than a sport. The preeminent Stones, who has learned to tumble backward over a height of 7'7�", deals with the event by treating his body as if it were a contrivance, nothing more. Rushing to the bar, he is, his doctor says, "like a highly informed computer making last-second adjustments."

When he locks in, precisely 69'2" from the bar, waiting for the crowd and any breeze to still, his magnificent body takes on the form of an inanimate object, as if, say, it were a baseball a pitcher was ready to throw. Finally, some silent bell rings, some blind light flashes, and the man, Dwight Stones, thrusts forward this object, his body, sending it, as he says, "running into the sky."

The kinetic mechanism is triggered only after he perceives the proper apparition of Dwight Stones approaching the bar. "I see a translucent image of myself coming out of myself," he says. "I watch to see if it will make it. Many times it doesn't I have to concentrate harder. Those who know me well can often tell by my fifth step [of 10] whether or not I will make it. The last time I set the record, I could see two steps before I jumped that I had made it. I could see that so clearly that I even quit on it a little—almost too much."

A stranger to this arcane art must find it extremely difficult to comprehend what Stones is talking about, but the consolation is that soon enough the jumper will advance something that may be understood. The only time silence ever attends Stones is when he stands at his mark for those two minutes, in prelude to a jump. (One can almost hear the cavalryman whispering, "Things are quiet, too quiet.")

Stones possesses what can best be described as an exhausting voice: it grates, whines, portends, challenges; it officiates. Sometimes, it seems, he puts it on automatic pilot. Often he borrows other voices for variety and emphasis (AAU officials, as portrayed by Stones, always speak basso profundo), and regularly he reenacts entire past discussions. Also, there is pantomime, most effectively when he illustrates how exactly it was he put his foot in his mouth (another plug for Puma), and even in the most pedestrian conversations Stones babbles with his hands. "Maybe you'll notice that Dwight has some feminine mannerisms," says his mother, Sandy, herself no slouch in the loquacious league.

Stones has been called "The Mouth with Legs." and, indeed, he has drawn as much attention to himself and his event with his tongue as with his lower limbs. "He's done so much for high jumping," says a chief rival, Tom Woods, "but we just don't want to listen to him anymore." Stones once explained a victory by alluding to the losers: "It's hard to clear seven feet when you have one hand on your throat." All of French Canada came down upon him at the Olympics, when a squadron of reporters wrote that Stones declared, "I'm very upset with the French-Canadians. The stadium isn't finished, and that's just plain rude." While attending UCLA he attacked that university for not providing him with the cushy jobs that football and basketball players were getting. He refers blithely to the AAU as "blackmailers" and once turned down a trip to China in this way: "What would you do over there? You can't talk to the people. That means for 24 hours a day you'd be dependent on the AAU. I'd go berserk." He regularly puts down the jumping conditions at the best meets, but he has, as well, often boasted at meets he endorsed that he would set records—and did just that. Stones has set the world outdoor record three times, most recently at 7'7�", and has broken the world indoor record, which now stands at 7'6�", seven times.

Everything considered, Dwight Stones has good reason to be keen on Dwight Stones, and he is not afraid to voice that opinion, e.g., "Nobody cared for high jumping for 10 years before me." Periodically, he makes such asinine declarations that even he backs off in the ensuing brouhaha, usually by promising that a more tactful new model of Dwight Stones has just been dashed off the assembly line. As he grudgingly allows, "I've accepted the fact that I don't know everything about everything."

Still, Stones retains what amounts to a moral obligation to be candid. This trait runs in the family, at least on his mother's side, where the twig is bent. Stones says, "I feel that I must say things that need being said," and then he goes on to relate a tale about a boy who was mute until he was nine years old. Then, out of the blue, he said, "The soup's cold." The tyke explained that the reason why he had never said anything before was that previously everything had been up to snuff. Well, Stones goes on, if the soup is cold, you had better call this to someone's attention or you're going to get cold soup as a matter of course.