Back in 1936 when I was 3 years old Jesse owns was the star of the Berlin Olympics. He won the 100, the 200, the long jump, and anchored the winning relay. 15 years later when I was just beginning my track and field efforts, at our first high school meet I won the long jump. I went home and made a booklet with which to keep a record of my track and field “career”. I cut out a photo of Jesse at the height of one of his jumps and pasted it on the cover of my booklet.
What most people do not know is that Jesse was an all-around track champion. In addition to setting the world record in the long jump at 26 feet 8 inches, a record that stood for more than 30 years, he also high jumped 6 foot 6 inches. They say that he long jumped 20 feet on the sidewalk when he was in Junior High. More astounding is that when he came home as an Olympic Champion he was unable to find a job and had to drop out of college.
For several years Jesse went on a barn-storming tour around the country racing against local horses. I well remember when he came to my hometown and beat my friend Darrel Craig on his horse in the 100 yard dash. I will always remember seeing him out run Darrel and his horse. Years later Jesse was hired by the City of Cleveland to be Director of Parks and recreation and had an impact on Ohio sports for many years. It was such an honor to be able to actually see my hero in person.
Jesse did not only inspire me to be the best track and field competitor that I could, but unbeknown to him, he actually helped me a lot in my own development as a rising track star. When I was in high school I read a lot about Jesse and picked up several “tricks” of the long-jumping trade from reading about his training techniques. In one of the articles I read he mentioned that he had improved his long jump ability uniform stride by running the hurdles in order to develop a uniform stride when was running up the board from which he would be jumping.
This technique of developing a uniform running stride enabled him not to waste jumps, called “scratching,” by stepping over the jumping board from which the officials measured each jump. I worked hard at running the hurdles for this reason, and actually became a rather proficient hurdler in the process. Most importantly, I only scratched three times in all the years I was competing. As it turned out, my cousin Allan and I tied for first place at our State meet and our school won the State Championship.
By far the most important way Jesse helped me in my track career was in changing my jumping style from just running and jumping to “running in the air” after leaving the ground. If you have ever seen photos of Jesse himself jumping chances are they will show him high in the air seemingly running through the air. Believe it or not, this “pretending” to run in the air actually works. This is why all college track coaches teach their jumpers to develop this skill. It takes a lot of practice to perfect and requires the development of strong stomach muscles. This technique actually added over a foot to my jumps when I was in college.
To finish up by going back to the 1936 Olympics, Jesse, along with the several other black athletes, created quite a furor there because they were a slap in the face to Adolph Hitler’s claims about the superiority of Aryan Race. In fact, he altered his practice of congratulating each event’s champion in person. He actually refused to shake hands with Jesse Owens.
By way of conclusion here, a while back I wrote another blog piece about another of my boyhood heroes, namely Jackie Robinson. It remains a puzzle to me why, in a town where and at a time when Black athletes were far from popular, that I should choose two to be my “heroes”. I’m glad I did.

Both my former student friend Lou Tassinary and my long-time friend and colleague Ray Boisvert responded to my post about Kant’s answer to Hume by suggesting that Kant may be the highwater mark of modern thought but he has been surpassed by more contemporary thinkers who have sought to incorporate the role of bodily and psychological reality into the account of how knowledge is formed. I whole-heartedly agree with them both. I did not want to imply that I thought Kant had finished the job- only that he had answered Hume.
Actually, in my mind the thinker who has made the most important contribution in regard to this issue is Michael Polanyi with his notion of “tacit knowing.” Polanyi argued that our cognitive powers are a function of the interaction between our bodily and our conceptual activity. This interaction has both a tacit pole and an explicit pole. The former arises out of the combination of our physical activity and our “subsidiary awareness” of the environment while the latter is formed by the combination of our focal awareness and our conceptual activity. Thus in and through our bodily activity, as Polanyi put it: “We always know more than we can say.”
Where Kant had focused on, indeed reduced, cognitive activity to the various functions of the mind alone (the “categories of the understanding”), Polanyi incorporated bodily activity as the cognitive matrix out of which all awareness arises. Our most basic awareness is always tacit, even as the reader’s focal understanding of the meaning of these sentences arises out of a subsidiary awareness of the significance of their individual letters. These two dimensions of cognitivity (the subsidiary and the focal) give rise to what we come to experience as knowledge. Bodily awareness and interaction is always the matrix out of which our cognition arises.
So we see that whereas Kant had answered Hume’s skepticism by establishing what Peter Strawson calls the “bounds of sense”, Polanyi has restructured our appreciation of the full cognitive enterprise by grounding all cognition in bodily awareness and interaction. Both Hume and Kant were victims of the narrowness often associated with Western, and especially the modern, epistemological enterprise. Polanyi has opened the way to a richer, more comprehensive view of human cognition. His view even suggests some possible lines of connection with certain movements within current psychology and existentialism. (Polanyi: Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension, Knowing and Being; Gill: The Tacit Mode.) If you are interested in seeing a diagram of the relationships and dynamics within the above-mentioned paragraph, see my book The Tacit Mode, p.39.