Pole Vaulting Farmer, 77, is a Living Legend

Chris Bennett

On a rural road in northern Georgia, a 77-year-old living legend is pounding blacktop, alternating sprints and brisk walks between a chain of mailboxes parallel to his farm. The box-to-box regimen is grueling, and the man is one of the finest septuagenarian athletes on the planet. Over the next year, he will try to break a world record by using a stick to fling his near four-score aged body into the sky. The man possesses medals, trophies and hall-of-fame accolades by the barrel, but his sporting accomplishments pale beside his true legacy: An immeasurable impact in the lives of thousands of young people.
There are many unique stories tied to U.S. agriculture—and then there is Cook Holliday. Coach, competitor, mentor, and friend, Holliday’s life of service has spawned an ongoing narrative seemingly drawn from fiction about a farm boy who cut cane in a swamp, catapulted onto the national stage, and grabbed life by the tail, using sports to better the lives of all those around him. Hyperbole aside, Cook Holliday, a pole-vaulting farmer—is an American treasure hiding in plain sight.

You Got Me?

On a small cattle and hay farm in Walton County, roughly 30 miles east of Atlanta in northcentral Georgia, Holliday walks into his barn toward an upright rack of vaulting poles and seizes his weapon of choice. Holding an 11’ fiberglass specimen, his mind leaps toward a jump and a frozen moment when he glides to success by a razor-thin margin, almost as if his inverted body is shedding an invisible skin against a vibrating crossbar. Holliday remains obsessed with vaulting, to the point where his dreams are a chain of mid-air climbs and floating descents. Even the daily act of walking up the front steps of his house is a moment of training—right arm up, and left foot pushing in perpetual takeoff mode.
Holliday grins and unravels his story with a heavy drawl, so sweet the words almost ring: “I was born to it. I was supposed to grow up on a farm and I was supposed to jump. All of my work ethic I got from farming. You got me?”
He keeps—You got me?—and a dozen other colloquialisms in a front pocket filled with points of emphasis, adding layers of unique color to his speech, and as he begins recounting a remarkable life, an infectious, overwhelming zest busts loose from all angles. Simply, it is impossible not to like Cook Holliday. Back to the past he goes; back to the beginning of his American tale.

Bouncer

In the heavy agriculture environment of Wilcox County, Holliday was born in 1942, and raised on a cotton, peanut and watermelon farm outside the tiny town of Rochelle—450 acres of flat ground he still owns. Dragging a flour sack altered by his mother, Lois, cotton picking was second-nature to Holliday, and he learned to gather white fiber even before enrolling in school. In mid-August, with the sticky heat of southern Georgia pressing down, Holliday kept deft hands moving, anxious to reach the turnrow and the salvation of a gallon water jug wrapped in a brown paper bag waiting under the tree line.
His father, Thomas, placed him behind the wheel of a tractor at age 7, plowing fields as Lois moved inside the house from room to room and window to window, keeping a nervous eye on Holliday. “Sure, I was too young, but that’s what we did back then because it was a hard living for everyone. My family had one job: farming. If you didn’t make it in the dirt, you didn’t make it. You got me?”
While Lois watched her grade school son grow up on the farm, climbing trees or scaling equipment to make precarious leaps, she nicknamed him Bouncer, triggered by Holliday’s inordinate love of motion. Lois’ prescient moniker was spot-on: Whether serendipity or Providence, Holliday’s life was about to pivot.

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