'Please Be Good" (TM)

The first man to clear 15 ft. in the pole vault, Cornelius Warmerdam. went on to jump 15 ft. 71 in. and set a record that stood for 15 years. The first man to clear 16 ft. was John Uelses. He did it in 1962, but today he is just one of the gang. Outfitted with twangy new fiber glass poles, skivvy-suited acrobats are soaring to unexplored heights almost every week. In Toronto, a West Virginia public relations man named Dave Tork rocketed 16 ft. 2% in. and claimed a new indoor world record. The very next night, in Portland. Ore., a wiry U.C.L.A. senior named Yang Chuan-kwang thundered 120 ft. down a runway and slammed his pole into the take-off well. Boing! Wheel 16 ft. 3 1/4 in.

Yang, 29, does not even regard pole vaulting as his speciality. The son of a Formosan farmer, he came to the U.S. to study track and field five years ago, learned so fast that he ranks as one of the world's best all-round athletes. A decathlon star, he won a silver medal at the 1960 Olympics. He has been clocked at 9.4 sec. for the loo-yd. dash--just .2 sec. off the world record -- runs the 120-yd. high hurdles in 13.9 sec., broad-jumps 25 ft. 5 in., high-jumps 6 ft. 4 in., whirls the javelin 238 ft. 7 in. But the pole vault is not Yang's cup of oolong. Until his big jump Yang had never gone higher than 14 ft. 7 in. in competition. "I used to hate practicing the pole vault." he says. "I was forever getting hit on the head by the pole. I even used to talk to the pole. I'd say, 'Be good. Maybe I'm not using you very well, but please be good to me.' "

Last May, Yang traded his old-fashioned aluminum vaulting pole in for a more flexible fiber glass model. "I had to learn to wait, wait for that pole to snap." But Yang slowly got the hang. "On the U.C.L.A. practice field,'' he recalls, "we had to put blocks under the uprights to get them up to 16 ft. Every time I hit the crossbar, one upright would fall over and hit me on the head."

One day in September, as much for self-preservation as anything else. Yang gave the little bit extra that put him over. Yang remeasured the crossbar. "Parry O'Brien was practicing the shot-put, and he called over, 'What was the height? About fifteen and a half?' When I told him 'Sixteen two,' he said, 'Wow! You were over that bar by six or seven inches.' "

Yang expected his record to be broken quickly. And so it was. Before the week was out, Finland's Pentti Nikula. 23, tuning up for a U.S. trip at a small indoor meet at home, vaulted an incredible 16 ft. 8 3/4 in., thus raising the mark by 5 1/2 in. in one prodigious jump. "It came as no surprise to me," said the wiry Finn, who last June set the outdoor record of 16 ft. 2 1/2 in.: "I am in top shape, and I'll shoot for 17 ft. next time."

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