Olympians can legitimately say they are the best athletes in the world. That point alone makes them special athletes in a larger context. This isn’t provincial, territorial, or narrow; this is the greatest global gathering in sports. We will have to wait one more year for Tokyo to celebrate the Summer Olympics, but while we try to display patience in the face of a pandemic, we can spend the summer of 2020 recalling great USC Olympians from the past.
Charley Paddock certainly rates among them.
Paddock is one of just seven USC Trojan Olympians to be named to the United States Olympic Hall of Fame. If Olympic athletes are profoundly special, Paddock can legitimately be viewed as particularly special — not so much for his actual Olympic achievements as the context in which he forged them.
For a lot of human beings, fighting in a war is an experience one never recovers from. This is not a reflection or revelation of deficient character; it is merely a reality that the scarring, jarring nature of war often brings about psychological traumas. A person isn’t less of a person because he or she suffers traumas; it is simply a fact of life that not every human being can easily live with the knowledge of having killed other human beings, or having seen other human beings die.
No respectable spiritual, ethical, or moral teacher would assail a person’s values or attack their character for suffering from mental health problems caused by the traumas of military combat. The “suck it up, be a man” notion of past centuries was prevalent in its time, but today — in a modern context — the medical and holistic sciences have advanced to the point where the devastating mental health effects of war are widely recognized and understood. Failing to cope with war is not a personal moral failure; it is an indicator and reminder of the vicious brutality of war itself, an illustration of why — as Pope John Paul II said — war is “always a defeat for humanity.”
Failing to handle the effects of war — if manifested in personal mental health problems — is not something for which human beings deserve criticism. When we consider how individual people handle war, we should focus less on criticizing the soldier who can’t cope, and more on admiring the people who come out of war whole and intact, and manage to build good, positive lives.
Charley Paddock did that at USC after serving with the United States Marines as a lieutenant in World War I.
For most of us, serving in a World War would require — maybe even deserve — many years of quiet respite and recovery after the end of combat. When World War I ended in late 1918, Charley Paddock could have spent a long time to process everything he had seen and endured. It would have been a perfectly natural, reasonable thing to do.
Instead, Charley Paddock became an Olympic champion in track and field sprint racing.
Paddock’s survival of war gave him wings at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium. The USC student flew to the gold medal in the 100-meter race — the most glamorous event in track and field, even today — and the 4 X 100-meter relay. He also earned a silver medal in the 200-meter race, a feat he replicated in the 1924 Summer Games in Paris.
Fight in a World War. Win Olympic gold medals roughly a year and a half later. How many men can make that claim?
Charley Paddock truly lived an extraordinary life in his early years. This USC student fought on in many more ways than one.