Not once did Gary Bastien ask his son to follow in his footsteps.
Gary didn’t hang up decathlon trophies or jerseys from his days at the U.S. Olympic trials around the house. At no point did he brag about stories from the glory days. And he certainly never pushed his son, Steven, to be an athlete, run track or compete in the same event he did.
It just happened that way.
Steven, a junior at Michigan, didn’t start running to chase his father’s records, and he was always reminded that it wasn’t something he had to do. He did it because it was something he loved to do.
“He loves the sport in a different way than I do,” Gary said. “He is able to really have a perspective where this is fun for him, where I used to wrap my whole identity into my performance.”
Despite two career paths that feature almost identical skillsets, personal records and techniques, it has been the younger Bastien’s ability to love what he does and stay positive that has separated him from his father and the rest of the pack.
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It was an ordinary day in Saline, Michigan when Gary Bastien realized that his son could be a star athlete. He was washing dishes as the neighborhood kids were playing on the backyard trampoline trying to dunk a Nerf ball into a hoop.
As he looked out the window, he could see the kids competing, trying to nail the perfect dunk. Soon, Gary looked up to see a five-year-old Steven fly into the air, do a front flip and dunk the ball with ease. As the other kids were jumping four feet away from the hoop, according to the elder Bastien, Steven was jumping from 14 feet.
“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t think I could have done that in my prime,’ and he was five,” Gary said. “It gets your attention as someone who was an athlete like I was.”
But Steven was just messing around with his friends. As always, he was just having fun.
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When it came to track, Gary was hesitant to push Steven in the beginning. After the elder Bastien graduated from Eastern Michigan, he moved to Auburn, Alabama and saw fathers who came to every practice and stood behind their sons’ shoulders, telling them what to do. He didn’t want to become a helicopter father who forced his son to do what he did.
“I always told him, ‘You don’t have to do this,’ ” Gary said. “ ‘Just because I did it doesn’t mean you have to match me or try to chase that. Do what you want to do.’ He just had a lot of natural inclination to want to do this stuff.”
Steven had a variety of sports to choose from — he played pickup basketball in the neighbors’ driveways and baseball with his uncle, a Michigan State graduate who played with former World Series hero Kirk Gibson. But he chose the same path and sport as his father. He even competed in the same event — the heptathlon.
“I definitely followed in his footsteps, but it wasn’t that I needed to do what Dad did,” Bastien said. “It just happened.”
As Steven approached middle school, he joined the Ann Arbor track club. Like his days playing in the backyard, it was mostly recreational. Most days, the team played capture the flag on the inside of the track, which would be its running workout for the day.
Even in high school, it was still just about the fun. As a freshman, Steven was small for his age — standing around 5-foot-1, weighing 95 pounds — and his father had to warn him that there was a chance he might not grow any more. That didn’t deter Steven, as he maintained the belief that he could catch up to the competition.
“My dad always told me, ‘You will get faster one day. That’s what happened to me and both your uncles,’ ” Steven said. “I just believed it. I always told my friends that were faster than me, ‘I am going to be just as fast as you,’ and they didn’t believe me. But it ended up happening.”
Eventually Steven, like his uncles and father, blossomed into an elite athlete and came into his own. As soon as he started to hit his stride, he had to adjust to a new high school coach — his father accepted a job at Saline High School after working as a part-time coach at Eastern Michigan.
“Had I been coaching at Eastern, I wouldn’t have experienced that with him,” Gary Bastien said. “That was just a great time to be able to coach your son.”
Added his son: “Sometimes it was frustrating, because he would tell me I wasn’t doing something right. I would butt heads with my dad sometimes, but overall it was a cool experience.”
With his father’s help, Steven was able to win Mr. Track and Field for the state of Michigan and set personal records in nearly every event.
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With college looming, Steven decided he wanted to get away from his hometown for the first time. For the first two years of his collegiate career, he attended Samford University in Alabama. Under coach Rod Tiffin, he improved his long jump, but his body quickly wore out.
“In that conference, I was doing so much,” Steven said. “My last outdoor season there, I went into the meet banged up from the rest of the season, but I did 14 events in two days. It was probably too much for my body to do all that.”
Unlike when he was younger, Steven wasn’t able to handle the sheer quantity of events. The fun he previously experienced couldn’t surpass the exhaustion. He decided he wanted to specialize more and focus on what he did best.
And in the back of his mind, Michigan had always been calling. Having grown up just outside Ann Arbor, that was where he wanted to be.
When former Wolverines runner Garrick Roemer called Steven to convince him to transfer, he was brought back to the days of playing in the backyard in Saline, where he and Roemer were childhood friends. Once Steven mentioned it to his father and they looked into it, a transfer made sense because of Michigan coach Jerry Clayton’s pedigree.
Steven envisioned the days of backyard basketball and Saline track and the fun days that lay ahead, but when Steven finally arrived on campus, his friend was no longer here. As Steven was taking his finals at the end of last year, Roemer passed away. Still, Clayton convinced him to stay.
“He is one of the best coaches in the world,” Gary said. “I know that because I threw against him when I coached at Eastern, but what Steven and I didn’t know is that he is not just a throwing coach. Steven will call me constantly and say, ‘You know what Coach Clayton told me about the high jump?’ and I will hang up the phone and I start walking through what he said, going, ‘You know, that makes sense, I didn’t know that.’ ”
And as helpful as Clayton’s wisdom has been on Steven’s running, he has been able to use it to cope with Roemer’s death as well.
“In order to be a decathlete, it’s just a different personality in order to be successful, and he seems to have that,” Clayton said. “You have to have that ability that when you do one event, and if things don’t go well you have to forget it and go to the next event, and he has that capacity.”
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Since coming to Michigan, even despite the tremendous grief of dealing with a friend’s death, Bastien has competed like he did when he was a kid — carefree. Clayton has allowed him to focus on being a decathlete through more individual treatment and day-to-day instruction.
After a disappointing run at the Big Ten Indoor Championships this winter, Bastien came into the NCAA Championships with a different mindset. Before the race, he was nervous, but this time he decided to go in with the mentality to have fun, put it all on the line and take a few risks.
It paid off, as Bastien set the program record for most points in a heptathlon twice and became Michigan’s first All-American in the event.
With Bastien comfortably under Clayton’s wing, the father who never wanted to push his son can finally take a step back. Gary Bastien watched his son become an All-American the same way he saw him dunk that basketball all those years ago — from afar.