Thumb Position Fingering: The 1968 Olympic Fix for 0-2-3

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Dick Fosbury was a high school high jumper in Medford, Oregon, and he couldn’t make the straddle work.

The straddle was the style everybody used back then. You went over the bar face down, with your legs straddling it. His coach pushed him to learn it, and by Fosbury’s own account, he didn’t have much success with it for the first half of his sophomore season.

All that coaching, and the straddle wasn’t getting him anywhere.

So he went back to the old scissors jump and started changing it. Bit by bit he shifted his position, until by his senior year he was going over the bar backward, head first, curving his body over it and landing on his back.

The local paper ran a photo of it with the caption “Fosbury Flops Over Bar.” Other coaches criticized it, too.

The flop that won gold in Mexico City

Then he went to Mexico City in 1968 and won the gold, with an Olympic record of 2.24 meters. That’s a little over 7 feet 4.

What he had was a different Shape. Arched backward over the bar, a flopper’s center of mass can pass under the bar while the body goes over it.

Four years later, at the Munich Olympics, 28 of the 40 high jumpers were going over backward.

All that straddle coaching didn’t become wrong. The flop just took over.

I call this the Straddle Ceiling: the point where more practice stops producing more result, and the only thing left to change is the Shape you’re practicing inside.

The 0-2-3 box in thumb position

Which brings me to 0-2-3.

Thumb, second finger, third finger. It’s the box a lot of us were handed on day one in thumb position, and I hate it. It’s inefficient and it gets you absolutely nowhere.

Count the fingers.

Three.

Your first finger is locked. It has nowhere to go. Every idea you have up there routes through the same three notes and a slide. That’s what turns the A-flat 7 on Cherokee into a wall. The G-flat you need isn’t available to you, so you can’t resolve out of it either.

Then you come off the bandstand thinking you need to shed more.

You don’t need to shed more.

You’re straddling.

The two thumb position shapes that replace 0-2-3

Play 0-1-3 and 0-1-2 instead, with 0 as your thumb, and get between them without shifting.

Your first finger is back in play, and each shape still only asks your hand for three notes. If the shapes are new to you, start with my three thumb position tricks, where I take them through the D string first.

The moving part is pivoting: your other fingers carry the thumb to a new spot instead of the whole hand sliding. It’s how I play Paul Chambers’s Dexterity solo in thumb position, bebop phrasing and all.

You can shred on this instrument. The standard box just doesn’t let you.

So the next time an idea up high won’t fit inside the box, don’t put more hours into the same shape. Change the shape, the way Fosbury did.