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Swerving between caution and optimism, his coaches do not want their charge to lose his focus. It is a sports truism that an athlete's toughest competition is himself, but in O'Brien's case, that is absolutely the case. University of Idaho track coach Mike Keller, who recruited him out of high school, worries that O'Brien does not have the killer instinct. Four times, says Keller, he has had a chance to crash through his own record; four times he has missed out by running a slow 1,500 m, the final event of the decathlon, and the one O'Brien simply hates. Keller keeps a story about the decathlon posted on his office door. It's called "The Beast." Says Keller: "The Beast is always stalking you, all the time, and if you let up, it's going to capture you."
For O'Brien, the Beast was not only the pole-vault blunder but also his tendency to get into what he now insists was merely youthful trouble. The son of an African-American father and a Finnish mother, O'Brien spent his first two years in foster homes before he was adopted by Jim and Virginia O'Brien, who eventually adopted five other children of various races. He was never a good student growing up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, but even at the age of 2, says Jim O'Brien, he was a phenomenal athlete, jumping off tables and running when other kids his age were "waddling."
When Dan left home for the University of Idaho, in Moscow, he cut loose. His college days were, as Keller is fond of telling anyone who asks, marked by "a lot of stumbling blocks." Says Keller, lapsing into the royal "we" favored by parents and coaches: "We did it the hard way, like flunking out of school, alcohol problems along the way." By 1986 O'Brien had lost his athletic scholarship, run up $5,000 in debts, written bad checks and been arrested for drunken driving. Keller helped straighten him out, getting him enrolled at Spokane Community College, and then back to the university, from which he graduated in 1989.
O'Brien has never kept his difficulties hidden--ask what he majored in at Idaho, and he just laughs--but he says his drinking is under control and he has outgrown any self-destructive behavior. It now feels good, he says, to be the one with water at a party, the one who leaves early because he has a goal he takes seriously. It feels good because he takes himself seriously.