RIO DE JANEIRO _ U.S. Olympic discus thrower Tavis Bailey is a long way from home here in Brazil.
He's 4,725 miles away, to be exact, from the place he grew up in Kannapolis, N.C., to the Olympic Stadium in Rio. That's where Bailey begins competition Friday morning in front of a crowd that will even dwarf the substantial number of fans who show up every fall Friday night in Kannapolis to watch the A.L. Brown High School Wonders play.
How did he get here? That's a question that winds through Kannapolis and Knoxville, Tenn., for its answer, with a stop in Oregon where Bailey, 24, made the U.S. Olympic team earlier this summer.
Bailey was a Wonder once, a huge offensive lineman for A.L. Brown once who could be balletic in his movements. They still marvel there at the time when Bailey, as a pulling guard on a running play, did something you hardly ever see.
"Tavis knocked one guy down, did a full forward roll, got on his feet and then knocked the safety down, too," said Todd Hagler, a mentor of Bailey's and the strength and conditioning coordinator at A.L. Brown. "We still show that film to our guys today."
Smart, tough and athletic, Bailey seemed like the sort of player destined for a college football career.
But even then Bailey also could throw a discus as well as anyone and he loved the feeling of getting a throw just right and watching the discus sail into the distance.
"You take a turn and a half in the ring, and when you throw it just right you are firing it from the ground up," Bailey said. "Ideally, it rolls off your index finger and you just watch it go. I loved it, and the coaches at A.L. Brown helped foster my love for it."
That is not nearly as marketable a skill as playing offensive guard in today's America _ nor is it as marketable as the computer skills Bailey has long had _ but it was really what Bailey wanted to do. Brian Landis, another mentor and coach, kept encouraging him. In high school as a senior at A.L. Brown in 2010, Bailey fired a discus 185 feet 1 inch, which set an all-classification NCHSAA record that still stands.
But man, the guy could play football.
"He should have been recruited by somebody big," Hagler said.
Bailey wasn't, but he still showed enough ability that Lenoir-Rhyne offered him a full scholarship to play Division II football after he graduated from high school. He also was getting some partial track scholarship offers from Division I schools, but none of those offers were as good as Lenoir-Rhyne's.
"So I went to college to play football because of the scholarship," Bailey said. "I was in a weird situation. My senior track season hadn't happened yet when the offer came, and I didn't want to take the risk that a partial scholarship might go up or down, but a full football scholarship was right there."
Bailey's parents _ Charles and Edwina Wright from Kannapolis _ tried to stay neutral in the process. "Football was a real family tradition for us in Kannapolis, and Tavis had gotten into it for awhile," Edwin Wright said. "But when he was having to make the Lenoir-Rhyne decision, he wanted me to weigh in on it. I said that decision is ultimately yours."
So Bailey went to Lenoir-Rhyne _ and didn't like it. "It just wasn't my cup of tea," he said. "It is smaller, tighter-knit. I wanted a bigger atmosphere."
He kept throwing the discus throughout, and by the spring he decided to give up football, transfer schools and concentrate on the discus. Tennessee offered Bailey a partial scholarship, so he went to Knoxville.
