![]() As in golf, the difference between really good and a champion often depends on mental strength: being able to forget one bad swing and move on to the next. Lentz and other lumberjacks often compare their sport to golf: Power comes from hip torque instead of arm strength precision comes from producing a repeatable swing. While strength is important, it’s far from the only thing that matters. The series began in 1985 as regional logging competitions in the United States and has now grown into national competitions for nearly 1,600 athletes in 27 countries, along with two separate Stihl world-title events. tight end, holds over virtually all his opponents in the Stihl Timbersports Series, which are the biggest-money events in the sport. That brute strength is the advantage that Lentz, who is roughly the size of an N.F.L. “When he manhandled him - just a slam job, it went that fast! - everyone was like, ‘Oh, my God!’” “And Jason absolutely slammed the guy,” Ezell says. The toughest guy in Ezell’s small town - 6-foot-2, 260 pounds, unbeaten as a fighter - challenged Lentz to arm wrestle. It led him right back to his father.Ī few years ago, Jason Lentz was visiting his best friend from childhood, Nathan Ezell, and they went to a fantasy-football draft. There, out from under Mel’s shadow, Jason Lentz was free to find his own path. Reluctant to follow in his dad’s steps but out of options, he flew to the other side of the world. Then his father put him in touch with a friend who had a job for Jason doing lumberjack exhibitions at Chimelong Paradise, an amusement park in Guangzhou, China. But when the opportunity fell through, he found himself instead making $10 an hour at a lumberyard in his college town, drinking too much, living off the McDonald’s Dollar Menu, getting his electricity shut off, lost. He made plans to play basketball overseas. He excelled at basketball, a bruising 6-foot-6 center who led the state in scoring as a high school senior before playing for Eastern Mennonite University, a Division III school in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. So instead of chopping the wood laid out for him by his dad, Lentz shot hoops on the side of the shed where his dad ground axes. “I didn’t want to be anything like him,” Jason says. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t.”Īnd Jason didn’t want to do it. “You always want your son to follow what you’re doing. But Mel soon learned a common lesson: “It’s hard to beat something into a kid if they don’t want to do it,” he told me one morning this past summer. Mel tried to push his son into the sport from the time he took Jason as a 2-year-old to the Lumberjack World Championships in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Her grandfather started the competition decades before.įour years later, after their first child, Jason, was born, Mel Lentz and Sears moved to her hometown, Diana, W.Va. That night, at the festival ball, he danced with Liz Sears, who had just been named the event’s Miss Congeniality. Being a lumberjack, in the woods as well as competitions, was all he had wanted for himself since he was a kid and saw his own father win trophies, and at 21, he was already on his way to becoming the most decorated American athlete in the history of his peculiar sport. Either way, his story can be said to begin in 1981, when his father, Melvin Lentz, showed up at the Webster County Woodchopping Festival in West Virginia.Īfter a weekend of wielding his huge seven-pound ax, his six-foot single-buck crosscut saw and his souped-up chain saw, called a hot saw, Mel won the contest. Or maybe it was because of all that wood he chopped in China. ![]() His father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, who had worked the Great Depression-era logging camps in Oregon, were all elite lumberjacks. ![]() Maybe it was Jason Lentz’s genetic destiny - though he certainly fought against it - to become one of the world’s best lumberjacks. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. ![]()
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