My "Mascot" Runs For Fun, Not Ego

October 22, 2024 5 min read

(While Geezer Jock takes a break from original reporting this week, this is a story I did on Joe Hoover, Jr., 78, when Geezer Jock was in its early stages as a newsletter in 2021 and Joe was 76. As you can see, Joe in the blue is the Geezer Jock "mascot" with this picture used as the masthead. Photo by Larry Staton.

By Ray Glier

If you are going to do Masters track events at 76 years old, says Joe Hoover, Jr., you have to take your ego, wad it up, and make it small enough to stuff into the toe of your track shoe.

“It’s so hard to talk people into doing Masters track and I think a lot of it is ego,” said Hoover, who lives in Wichita, Kansas. “You try and come back at 60 years old when you have been a college athlete, or high school athlete, and you are trying to compare yourself to what you were back then.”

The familiar refrain from the Masters athlete after they do not meet expectations set 40 years ago is, “That was terrible.”

And then your ego really can mislead, Hoover says.

“They come out and work way too hard to get it all back,” he said. “They run the same training session they ran in college, then they get hurt right away, and get discouraged. Muscles get strong in weeks, ligaments and tendons take months. You can get hurt real easy.”

Participation shouldn’t turn just on success, Joe said, so he is not allowing declining skills stop him from fun.

He was 5-foot-7 in high school and could dunk anything he could hold through a 10-foot high basketball rim. Joe, as the kids say, had hops. He did the high jump at Quenemo High School in Kansas without any training and went 6-foot-2 for first place in the prestigious Ottawa (Ks.) Relays.

With a little training, Hoover thought he could go 6-6. He never got the training.

His Personal Record in the High Jump is still that 6-foot-2 mark from 59 years ago.

In the USA Track & Field Masters Combined Events Championship in Ft. Collins, Colorado in August, 2021, Hoover went 4-foot-3.25 in one of the eight events of his Decathlon (he skipped two). It hurt some, he said, to know he was once capable of being two feet better.

But he felt no shame. Hoover is not going to let track be a two-dimensional activity for him. It means more to him than Do Great or Stay Home. He just dove into the Decathlon, like he was a 16-year old again playing all the sports for fun.

Here is a video of Joe winning a 50-meter dash.

Hoover won the Decathlon in Ft. Collins against one other competitor, but that’s only part of the point. He competed. He’s fit. He’s putting himself out there. Joe Hoover has had a mind shift that tosses ego into the back seat of his ride.

So, after you downsize your ego, you take the fun and drape it on your shoulders and go for it. Besides, Joe got 800 points for that jump and 4-foot-3 is not terrible for his age, which was 75 at the time.

“It’s just fun doing the best you can,” Hoover said. “I’m pretty competitive, but if I run a PR and still get beat, I’m really happy I got a PR.”

Here is his page at www.mastersrankings.com.

In 2022, Hoover was first in the long jump, second in the triple jump and fourth in the 50-meter sprint outdoors in the USATF rankings.

In 2023, Joe was second in the long jump, second in triple jump, and third in the high jump indoors in the U.S. In 2024, at 78, he is fourth in the triple jump outdoors in the U.S.

You see, it will come back to you, if you are patient.

Hoover plays basketball Tuesday evenings at his church. He has two track workouts a week at Wichita State University and lifts weights twice a week at his home with a simple weight machine. It has been a chore trying to keep up with his friend, Steve Wilson, who owns world records in the standing long jump for 60 year olds, 65, and 70. Wilson went eight feet at 70 years old.

Here is what else you need to know about Joe Hoover, Jr. He is the son of Joe Hoover, Sr., who got fired from four high school teaching jobs because he would not automatically pass the star player on the football team. Joe, Sr. wanted the star to try a little in science class.

“My dad was reasonable about it,” Hoover said.

When the star didn’t try, he got what he deserved, an ‘F’. And Joe, Sr., got a one-way ticket out of town.

“That wasn’t easy for my mom having to move all those kids from town to town,” Joe, Jr. said. They were, after all, a family of 12, 8 boys, two girls, and mom and dad. It wasn’t like they could throw it all in the back of a Country Squire and roar off in a cloud of dust in a day.

Wouldn’t a dad like that make you proud, though? Wouldn’t that give you some guts to keep high jumping and running at 76?

When his father was assaulted while walking home from work after his second job one night near Ft. Riley, and permanently disabled, the family bought a dairy farm. His mother, a farm girl, milked 30 cows every morning. The younger kids helped until they all went off to college and Mrs. Hoover had to carry those buckets. She used a milker, but there was no pipeline to the holding tank so Mrs. Hoover had to carry it all in those galvanized steel buckets.

The 5-foot-4 Mrs. Hoover, whose name was Leola, after Pope Leo, injured both rotator cuffs lugging that milk and she milked those cows until she was 70.

The ethos of some Masters athletes is subterranean and you have to dig for it. When you find it, you understand why these people are not in a rocking chair at 70, 75, 80. They are competing and many of them have wadded up their egos. They also have a wife, like Joe’s Donna, who puts up with her track obsessed husband.

So if you are trying to re-create your former self you will have better luck trying to grab a puff of smoke with your hand. It’s not happening. Rejoice in the old new you, like Joe Hoover, Jr.