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Prairie thrower overcomes difficult early life

Jon Lawson has become one of the top track and field athletes in state

By Matt Calkins
Published: May 21, 2011, 12:00am
4 Photos
Prairie's Jon Lawson has the state's leading marks for Class 3A athletes in the shot put and the discus as he heads into this weekend's bi-district meet in Tacoma.
Prairie's Jon Lawson has the state's leading marks for Class 3A athletes in the shot put and the discus as he heads into this weekend's bi-district meet in Tacoma. Photo Gallery

Before he was the kid that everyone wanted to be like, Jon Lawson was the kid nobody wanted to be.

Lawson wasn’t enviable when his alcoholic father was commanding him to kick his beaten mother. Lawson wasn’t someone whose peers would want to trade lives with when his mom was a spiraling methamphetamine addict. No one would view Lawson as a source of inspiration when, after a day of being bullied at school, he’d come home to cocaine-snorting house guests and his mother’s new drug-dealing boyfriend.

No, it turns out the kid with the brightest future, is also the one with the darkest past.

“I never thought I’d become anything,” said Lawson, a Prairie High senior who heads into this weekend’s bi-district meet with the year’s best marks among Class 3A athletes in the state in both the shot put and discus. “I never thought I’d have a point in life.”

Someone without knowledge of Lawson’s upbringing would react to these words with disbelief. The 18-year-old is a 6-foot-5, 215-pound specimen whose body fat has gone into hiding.

He runs a 4.5 40-yard dash and owns a 38-inch vertical leap. And even though Lawson has never played a single down, Prairie football coach Terry Hyde said he’s the best athlete the school has had in five years.

But such physical prowess should almost come as an expectation given the gene pool Lawson has floated across. His grandfather John Gambill was a basketball star at New Mexico State who fell one cut short of making the Seattle SuperSonics, and his aunt Heather Gambill (now Heather Knight) was a track-and-field standout who earned a scholarship to Boise State.

However, the undisputed centerpiece of the family’s athletic mantle was Jon’s mother, Johanna Lawson, a shot-putter who threw a state record as a freshman, threw a state best as a senior … and eventually threw it all away.

Olympic dreams

Johanna’s track and field supremacy was not limited to putting the shot. While competing at Battle Ground High as Johanna Gambill, she could long jump 19 feet, triple jump 39 and high jump almost 6.

The ultimate goal was to earn a berth to the 2000 Olympics as a heptathlete, but her dream of seeing the torch up close would dramatically flame out.

Johanna said her unraveling began at the state meet her freshman year of high school, when a pulled hamstring kept her out of three events she was expected to win.

A year of “me being a drama queen” altered her focus as a sophomore, but she found redemption at state her senior year — joining forces with her younger sister Heather to lead the Tigers to second place in state all by themselves.

As for her junior season? Johanna sat that one out.

After all, that’s when she was pregnant with Jon.

“I had some moments of stupidity in my youth and made some wrong choices,” said Johanna, 35. “I didn’t end up going where everybody planned for me to go. I didn’t take advantage of everything that was handed to me.”

To be clear, Johanna by no means regrets the birth of her son, but her pregnancy does reflect a period of recklessness and rebellion. Johanna confesses she had a poor relationship with both of her parents, and the fact that her father was a police officer only amplified her defiance.

So she drank excessively. She neglected her studies. She ended up marrying Jon’s father, whose substance abuse, she said, led to domestic abuse.

From Johanna’s viewpoint, the Northwest skies looked as gloomy as ever. Little did she know, the real storm was yet to come.

“There was a time where I kind of expected to get a call that she was dead,” said Johanna’s father, John Gambill. “There wasn’t a whole lot we could do.”

Toxic cycle

Johanna’s husband left her when Jon was 3, but the removal of one toxic figure simply left a vacancy for another. When she met her new boyfriend Chris a year later, so began a six-year cyclone that ravaged both mother and son.

Johanna squandered her opportunity to compete in Division I track, but still was able to play basketball at Clark College. In her spare time, however, she tended bar to help support the household. Chris did his part by selling drugs.

Sometimes Johanna would return from practice horrified, spotting lines of cocaine on one side of the living room, bowls of marijuana on the other, and her son running around in between. Sometimes 8-year-old Jon would confront Chris terrified, jumping on him to protect his mom from a beating while often enduring blows himself.

Rarely would a day pass in which Johanna didn’t feel overwhelmed — hysterical over the hell she had dropped her son into, but confounded as to how to escape. Because once she invited crystal meth into her life, she couldn’t summon the strength to eject it.

“It just kills me to know what I put Jonothan through,” said Johanna, fighting back tears. “But that’s the thing about the whole addiction process. You get stuck in a cycle. It’s hopeless. It’s awful.”

Child Protective Services finally intervened when Jon was 10, and Chris was hauled off to prison on a domestic-violence charge. Johanna, meanwhile, enrolled herself in a rehabilitation program, and aside from a month-long relapse in 2006, has been clean for seven years.

Jon has gradually repaired his relationship with his mother, but hasn’t lived with her for about six years. Instead, he resides with his grandparents — a move that literally and figuratively got him on track.

Sports are sanctuary

Johanna shudders when she thinks about the violence Jon suffered when left alone with Chris. She won’t delve into specifics — explaining only that there was no sexual contact — but her countenance suggests it was atrocious.

What’s more is that Jon found no sanctuary at school. Standing 6-foot-3 before he was 14, Lawson was always the tallest kid in class growing up — and because he was linguine-thin and afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder, was a constant source of ridicule among elementary-school peers.

Then one day in seventh grade, Jon stepped onto the basketball court. Shortly after, he experienced a new sensation: popularity.

“I never really had friends. Then I did basketball, and I had friends,” Lawson said. “It was kind of weird.”

John Gambill understands. Lawson’s grandfather played Division I hoops at New Mexico State; his Aggies defeating three different teams ranked No. 2 in the country in 1967.

So in addition to providing Jon’s life with the structure you’d expect from a 29-year cop, Gambill served as a beacon of knowledge for all things basketball. Then, in a plot twist, he told Jon to stop playing basketball and focus on throwing.

“You could see that there was potential, and since he hadn’t played basketball as a kid, he’d really have to spend a lot of time in the gym to get good,” Gambill said. “I told him that he might consider working on track. I told him he could have a pretty good future there.”

But not even Gambill thought the future would be this good.

The right track

Lawson wasn’t completely persuaded by his grandfather’s advice, so he played hoops his freshman year at Prairie and joined the track team to stay in shape. He hasn’t worn a basketball jersey since.

With Gambill acting as his primary coach, Lawson has gained 45 pounds over the past three years while adding more than 15 feet to his shot put and 60 feet to his discus throw. Last year, he won the 3A state title in shot put and finished second in discus by 3 inches.

Lawson’s toss of 57 feet inches won last week’s district shot put final by over 12 feet, and his discus hurl of 174 feet six inches was nearly 35 feet better than second place. But feet and inches are hardly the only means of measuring Jon’s ability. Oohs and ahhs are equally effective.

“When you watch him throw, it’s just amazing. Every track meet we go to, everyone’s like ‘wow,’ It’s unbelievable,” said Tyler Crebar, Lawson’s teammate and fellow discus thrower. “It just hangs up there. To me, it’s motivation.”

And Crebar’s not even referencing the hammer throw, which is Lawson’s best event despite being unsanctioned by the WIAA.

Just more than two years ago, revered hammer coach Todd Taylor met Lawson at a meet and began training him soon after. Now Lawson is ranked fourth in the country, and Taylor said he has Olympic potential. But even if he doesn’t, Lawson’s walking so tall these days, you’d swear he were standing on a podium.

Prairie track coach Curtis Crebar remembers Jon as a freshman; timid, introverted — his personality cocooned. Three years later, his confidence is just as conspicuous as his gargantuan frame.

“Kids in high school, they need to find that thing that builds their self esteem, develop that image of themselves where they know they can go on to greatness and track has been that for Jon,” said Crebar, Tyler’s father. “But he’s worked hard for it. He’s taken everything that happened and left it behind. Now he’s got that self-esteem — it’s been a complete metamorphosis.”

Heading to JC

There is no doubt Lawson can produce astronomical numbers. But ask him to divide or find the square root of some of them, and he might be there for a while.

A lifelong struggle with math is keeping him from competing at the Division I level next season — Jon opting to attend Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Ore., for two years in order to iron out his academic wrinkles.

It’s not an ideal circumstance for a top-flight athlete, but Johanna certainly isn’t complaining. For at least two years, she won’t have to travel far to watch her son compete.

Picking out Lawson’s mom at a track meet is like picking out a cockatoo in a library. Anytime Jon has a big throw, Johanna generates a scream slightly louder than the starter pistol.

Her enthusiasm stands in stark contrast to the incessant despair she once endured. But then again, she has a lot to be happy about these days.

Finally in a healthy long-term relationship, Johanna has created a gloriously normal life for herself. She makes her living as a coach at an inpatient rehab facility, counseling boys ages 13-18 who have succumbed to substance abuse.

Some are violent. Many come from broken homes. And almost all remind her of what Jon could have become.

“Jonothan has really overcome a lot. He could have very easily gone one way and done some of the things that the kids I work with do now, but he chose to do something different. He’s learned healthy boundaries, and he’s done everything magnificently on his own,” Johanna said. “I’m so proud of him. I told him that if he wants to be competitive, he has to make good choices, and he has. Everything I couldn’t have, I want for Jonothan.”

All that said, Lawson is exorcising as much as he is exercising these days.

He finished up counseling about a year ago, but still has mood swings. And while he and his mother have grown extremely close over the past four years — cultivating what he calls a brother-sister-type relationship — there still are moments where emotions come to a boil and he lashes out at her.

And Johanna won’t lie. She laments her transgressions. She wonders — sometimes intently — how her track and field career might have turned out had she not stepped out of her lane.

But for the sake of her sanity Johanna has convinced herself that there’s a reason she chose her path. And Jon, it seems, is supplying her with evidence.

“There were times where I didn’t know what life was going to be like when I got home. I’ve had a really hard life, but track kind of gave me hope,” Lawson said. “I used to think I would just be another person out there doing my own thing, but track’s turned it around. A lot of people know me and say ‘hey, you’re a good thrower.’ It’s changed my life around. It’s made me become something.”

Matt Calkins can be contacted at 360-735-4528 or email matt.calkins@columbian.com

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