Section: World’s Fastest Human
Maurice Greene is the latest holder of the grand and curious title World’s Fastest Human bestowed on men who have stolen fractions of seconds from the 100-meter record
IT’S AN UNUSUAL title, World’s Fastest Human. The human is the kicker. That has a special ring to it. Most times, when employing definitive terms to designate superiority in our favored species, it’s the Something Man or maybe the Something Woman. The World’s Strongest Man, for example. Even in sideshows, the freaks were half-man, half-animal, or half-man, half-bird. They were not half-human. No, the World’s Fastest, human division, stands pretty much alone. Maybe because the resolution is so precise: First one to the finish line wins. On your mark, get set, go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…and change. The title is determined by minuscule but indisputable fractions.
“I’ll tell you this,” says Bob Hayes, who was the World’s Fastest Human not so long ago, “once you become that, you can only go down.”
Although we have always had fastest humans, the best evidence is that we’ve had the World’s Fastest Human for only 80 years. We don’t know who coined the title, but apparently it was first applied to Charlie Paddock, in the spring of 1921, after he ran the 100 yards in 9.6 seconds in Berkeley, Calif. Paddock was quite a fellow. He was the 1920 Olympic champion in the 100 meters and was known to down a sherry and a raw egg before a race. On the cinders he was partial to wearing silk. Superstitious, he knocked on every wooden thing he could find on his way to the starting line, and then he engaged in a studied ritual, putting his hands way out in front, then drawing them back. It could be distracting, especially if you were in the lane next to him. At the other end of the race he finished by throwing himself into the air as the tape loomed. Off the track, too, Charlie Paddock was a fascinating piece of work.
“You mean I can’t live up to him?” asks Maurice Greene, the latest in the line of World’s Fastest Humans. He is altogether a different sort from the original. The myth persists that the fastest sprinters are all of a type–arrogant and gunslingers are the most favored epithets–but the evidence doesn’t support that hackneyed assessment. Carl Lewis and Leroy Burrell were, for example, teammates and friends as well as rivals for years. However, apart from the fact that they were, in succession, the World’s Fastest Human, they seemed to have nothing in common. Lewis was thin, shrill and controversial. Burrell was stocky, reserved and conventional. He has become a college coach; Lewis, an aspiring movie actor.
Ever deductive, Lewis explains whence he thinks the bogus sprinters’ image derives. “A lot of it comes from the fact that we don’t stay together that much,” he says. “Pole vaulters are always together, talking about their poles. Who else can they talk to? And the weight guys, they’re all on drugs, so they have that in common to talk about. Distance runners run together–I mean, it’s so boring, all that running. But no matter how close I was to my teammates, even if we’d drive to a meet together, then we’d split up. I suppose that made us look arrogant. Some sprinters do think we’re knockout punchers. They think they have to get into your head and all that stuff. I hate that.”
Not unlike the odd couple of Lewis and Burrell, today we have Greene and Ato Boldon of Trinidad, his teammate on HSI, the Irvine, California-based firm that represents two dozen track athletes. Boldon has never quite been the Fastest, but he has been the 200-meter world champion, and he often follows close on Greene in the 100, as he did in Sydney, silver to Greene’s gold. They are the best of friends, yet Inger Miller, their teammate, says simply, “Mo’s a feeler, Ato’s a thinker.” You can’t get any more different than that.
On the track Boldon looks as if he were running in black tie, stylishly coiffed, all sleek in his shades. Now, though, here comes the World’s Fastest Human stepping into his lane in the center of the track, number 4. Mo Greene is shorn of locks and wears loose, casual apparel: a nondescript baggy shirt pulled over another one and floppy sweatpants. He looks as though he is preparing to rake leaves. Suddenly he tenses, gazing toward the finish, visualizing the race before him, then looking down in a kind of meditation, it seems, and finally stalking here and there in his lane, as an animal would mark his realm. As late as 1924, when Paddock was still running, the lanes were indeed territorial, divided by cords that ran their length. Greene still has that proprietary attitude. If you own lane 4, the rest of the track should belong to you too.
Greene seems to understand what he has fallen heir to. The World’s Fastest Human is not a mere champion or some vote-getting MVP choice. Perhaps the Fastest once shared eminence with the Heavyweight Champion of the World, but there is no royal line to that title anymore, since it has been split up and is almost capriciously bestowed by alphabet organizations, cable networks and Don King. Anyway, with the World’s Fastest Human, what is most important is not that he beats other people to succeed to the title but that he advances the attainment of Homo sapiens. We are all, after a fashion, in the World’s Fastest Human’s train. The honor can be overwhelming. “It’s mind-boggling when you realize it’s you,” Hayes says. “It’s hard for me to speak of it.”
Says Lewis: “Anybody who can relate what it’s like being the World’s Fastest Human, he’d have to be really strange. I didn’t feel any different as the fastest than I felt when I was the 50th fastest. So I would tell myself that I’m only the fastest that anyone knows of. There’s a kid in Africa or Iran or somewhere who could run faster, but his life just took a different path.”
Greene, who is uncommonly confident about what he does, is equally humble about what he is. “I don’t think of myself as the World’s Fastest Human,” he says. “If I did, I’d lose my edge. Being the fastest is only my job. It’s not who I am. The person sitting here talking to you is not the person you see on the track.”
Appearances support this view. Greene is 5’9" and weighs 175 pounds. In repose at home he is almost cute, not at all resembling that powerful, hulking creature that preys upon the track, exhibiting such a sense of supremacy. He did not even make the 1996 Olympics and nearly quit the sport, but a few weeks after the Games he drove from his Kansas City home to Los Angeles to work under John Smith, the renowned sprint coach. When Smith rather casually inquired, “What do you want to do?” Greene baldly replied, “I want to put American track and field on my shoulders.”
Smith, 51, who held the 400-meter world record in 1971, is a proud match for his premier student. “In every great sprinter, God left one thing out,” he declares.
What did God leave out of Mo, John?
“Me.”
In addition to Smith, two circumstances–one personal, one institutional–have shaped Greene. For the most part our fastest sprinters have been groomed in college. Greene, except for dallying awhile in a community college, enjoyed no intermediate status. “He went directly from high school to the international stage,” says Craig Masback, CEO of USA Track & Field. “That’s a much bigger jump than some NBA star makes.”
Then, there is this: Greene, like all American track stalwarts, has learned that he is a prophet without honor in his own land. World’s Fastest Human he may be–and, by his own assessment, “a rock star” in much of Europe and Asia–but he possesses a low Q rating in the U.S.A., especially in any year that is not divisible by four. Lewis has been retired five years and was last World’s Fastest a decade ago, but many Americans think he still reigns.
Unfortunately for Greene, many of his countrymen recall him primarily as one of the four Ugly Americans who hoo-hawed and pranced about, rolling around in red-white-and-blue, after they had won the 4x100 relay at Sydney. In fact, it was Greene’s teammates who were guilty of the grossest exhibitionism. “They were just kids–kids from the ghetto who’d never been in a situation like that before,” Smith says. “So they overdid it, they acted like buffoons.” Greene, however, wasn’t much more exuberant than when he’d won the 100 on his own. Nevertheless, because track has such low visibility in the U.S., that singular moment from the Olympics prevails in most memories.
But no. Look over there now, in the midnight shadows, sitting silently on the curb–there is a more representative Mo Greene. It is mid-June, and fireworks are going off, signaling the end of the Grand Prix meet in Athens, at the stadium where the track events of the 2004 Games will be held. It was also here, four years ago, that Greene first won the world championship, and on this track in 1999 that he sped to the finish in 9.79 seconds, which is the fastest anyone created in the image of God has ever negotiated 100 meters…clean. (Ben Johnson also ran a 9.79, in 1988, but it was expunged from the record book after he tested positive for steroids.)
Greene has been the ballyhooed star of this year’s meet, paid much the highest appearance fee. But now the show is over, and the promoters have forgotten their meal ticket. There is no car to take the World’s Fastest Human through the horrendous Athens traffic back to his hotel. One can imagine almost any other U.S. sports hero’s reaction to such a revolting development: sullen, stomping about, ordering his do-boys to commandeer a stretch. But Mo sits patiently on the curb in the dark, and when his manager, Emmanuel Hudson, finally scares up a car, Greene refuses to let it depart before he has jammed in a passel of teammates, all around him and on his lap.
The kid from Kansas City remains grateful. Even if he has not broken his record this night, even if he has managed only 9.91 (which he, of such high standards, characterizes as a time that “sucks”), the World’s Fastest Human makes millions of dollars a year, and if he is not famous in Cincinnati, he is in Osaka. He is rich and he is Nike and he is happy. Only a day earlier, ambling off the practice track in Athens, Greene had suddenly thrown up his arms and screamed, “I love this sport! I love my teammates! I love all the things that go with my sport!” Then he dashed around a corner and up a hill, running just for the joy of it.
UNLIKE MANY modern athletes, Greene understands his place in the annals of his sport. “Mo is very respectful of history, of what came before,” Smith says. Seeing Greene’s potential, the coach early on instructed him in how to behave, should he indeed become royalty. “He caught on right away,” Smith says. “In fact, now he’s spending too much time promoting the whole sport.”
At the Penn Relays in April, Michael Johnson was making what was billed as his “farewell appearance on American soil.” While Johnson rarely competed in the U.S. and was never popular, lacking any crossover appeal–“the anti-Carl,” Lewis dismissively calls him–he was Lewis’s successor as the premier U.S. male track champion. Greene and Johnson have never been friends, and before their 200-meter showdown at the U.S. Olympic Trials last summer they even had something of a newspaper feud. Riled, they both got all worked up and injured themselves in the race–thus to lose the Sydney medals that were there for the taking. Yet during his last U.S. victory lap at the Penn Relays, on the far turn, Johnson was startled by Greene, who dashed onto the track and embraced him. Ave atque vale. Hail and farewell.
After the meet Greene sat in the hotel bus. It began to depart, but he demanded that the driver wait till Johnson arrived. “I can come right back for him,” the driver said, but Greene protested that there was too much traffic. So the bus waited.
This summer, though, Greene has assumed Johnson’s mantle, and even if Marion Jones remains the prime all-gender U.S. track personality, he will be the indisputable male star at the world championships starting this week in Edmonton. The mere fact that Greene competes in the 100 affords him the most visibility. The 100 is more than ever the cynosure of track, but for a long time even the World’s Fastest Human played second fiddle to the mile. That was the glamour race. As recently as a quarter century ago, middle-distance runners could demand guarantees, while sprinters had to take nothing or leave it. Two things changed this situation.
One was Lewis. Smith swings his arm wide around the lobby of the five-star hotel where the track performers are sequestered in Athens. “We’re in this hotel because of one man: Carl Lewis,” he says. “Carl said, ‘This is the kind of hotel where I’m staying,’ and he did, and soon everybody was with him. Nobody was better at supporting other athletes than Carl. He was smart and confident, but he got an unfair reputation. Amateurs were supposed to be grateful, and he wasn’t, and he was made to pay for that.”
“They didn’t like what I was making, so all the promoters declared a prix fixe for everybody,” Lewis says. “I said, ‘Fine, I’ll take the summer off.’” There would be no cut rate. The promoters caved. Lewis was too valuable at the box office. Also, he was the first postwar World’s Fastest Human to market the role.
The second reason for the ascension of the sprints was a variant of racial prejudice. Blacks had been a presence in sprints as far back as 1886, when a black man identified only as A. Wharton became one of the first runners on record to “beat even time”–that is, run the 100 yards in 10 seconds flat. (The 100 yards is about nine yards and a foot shorter than the 100 meters.) Eddie Tolan, whom white sportswriters dubbed the Midnight Express, was the first African-American to win Olympic gold in the 100 meters, in 1932, preceding Jesse Owens, the so-called Ebony Antelope, in 1936. After Hayes’s gold in 1964, the sprints were increasingly–then utterly–dominated by blacks, even as the longer races, especially the mile, remained largely a white province. However, as Africans began to enter the distance lists, beating whites, interest in the longer races, even the mile, began to diminish. Suddenly African-American and African-European sprinters became more attractive.
Still, even now a journeyman white middle-distance runner typically commands higher guarantees than all but the top black sprinters. Emmanuel Hudson shakes his head ruefully in acknowledgment of this economic reality. “Oh, definitely,” he says. Hudson knows.
Hudson is lobby-sitting in Athens with Ian Stewart, a former world-class middle-distance runner, who organizes and promotes British meets. The business of track remains something of an old-world Turkish bazaar, with runners or their managers haggling with promoters–not only about guarantees, but also about airline tickets (including class), hotels and performance bonuses. “If we ever get a white American–or even a [white] British–runner who can win the 1,500, he’ll dwarf what Maurice is making,” says Stewart. Hudson purses his lips, nodding at that cold assessment.
So if Alan Webb, the Virginia high school phenom who broke the scholastic mile record at the Prefontaine meet in Oregon this spring, develops into a star, he’ll turn the economics of track and field on its head. Ever mindful of the continuum of history, Greene–he who ran onto the track to bid Michael Johnson goodbye–jumped out and embraced Webb in welcome at the Prefontaine. “He don’t look like no high school dude,” Mo said.
Whereas Lewis caught–and fought–track during a transitional phase, when it was seeking to shuck the hypocrisy of amateurism, Greene is really the first all-pro World’s Fastest Human. He still must deal with a sport that remains marketing-deficient (even in Europe) and antediluvian in so many other respects. Surely no sport has entered the 21st century if it still features those rinky-dink number bibs that are sold to advertisers as billboards by meet promoters and attached to all track jerseys. Imagine Pete Sampras having to take safety pins–safety pins!–and affix a tacky paper ID number to his shirt before he heads onto Centre Court.
Masback even believes the metric system in track inhibits its popularity in nonmetric America. “The 40-yard distance they use in football scouting is probably better known now in the U.S. than the 100 meters,” he says. Always, too, there is the specter of drugs, track’s one Horseman of the Apocalypse. Who knows how prevalent doping is? “It’s not true that everyone does it,” says Lewis. “Maybe 10 percent, but you get to the finals of some event, then it’s five out of eight.” Masback protests that the U.S., with random testing, has greatly reduced drug use among its runners, and that they are getting a bum rap. Regardless, the perception of rampant doping remains, so much of corporate America shies away from associating with track. Also, given human nature, whoever is on top bears the greatest suspicion.
“So we’re the whipping boys in track today,” Smith snaps. “I’m used to that talk about HSI. It’s like the stigma of being black. But if they’re whispering that we’re succeeding because of drugs, then we’ve already won, because that means they don’t believe they can beat us. We are pure of body, mind and soul. We’ve endured the most stringent of tests. Mo’s been tested three times in a week, but we’re still running the fastest. That’s because of our belief system–not any pharmacology.”
MOST OF the World’s Fastest Humans have had short shelf lives. This had largely to do with the shamateur nature of the sport and the emphasis on the Olympics, which forced track stars to quit training and get a job even when they had their best races left in them. Who remembers Jim Hines, gold medalist at Mexico City in 1968, the first man to crack 10 seconds in the 100 meters? He abandoned the track to join the Miami Dolphins, for whom he played for one season and then disappeared from view. Lewis is the only 100-meter repeat gold medalist and one of the few “speed demons,” as we used to call them, who sustained their fame. It would be melodramatic to suggest that World’s Fastest Humans are jinxed, but few have prospered for long. Wyomia Tyus, the World’s Fastest Woman in the '60s, observed, “The world isn’t attuned to sprinters. We’re around, flashy and successful for a year or two. Then we’re gone, while the world goes on being run by plodders.”
Bobby Joe Morrow, the triple gold medalist (100,200and 4x100 relay in Melbourne in 1956), was literally left at the airport as the 1960 U.S. team departed for Rome, informed only then that, as an alternate, he would not be going, and he remains bitter about it to this day. Harold Abrahams, the 1924 gold medalist, was–wouldn’t you know it?–barely dead when Chariots of Fire made him world famous. Jesse Owens, of course, became a saintly figure because he showed up Hitler, but a fat lot of good that did him back in the land of the free and the home of the brave. He was accused of letting his country down because he didn’t enter foreign races that the Amateur Athletic Union had decreed he should run in (without pay, naturally). Owens left Ohio State to take advantage of his moment in the sun, then bemoaned his lack of real opportunity: “Everybody wanted to meet me, but no one wanted to offer me a job.” Further, when he tried to take advantage of his symbolic status, other blacks derided him as America’s “official Negro”; Harry Edwards, the Berkeley sociology professor, even disparaged Owens as “a bootlicking Uncle Tom.”
Paddock, who had been Owens’s childhood hero, unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to remain an amateur, arguing that he could make more money under the table. Paddock knew whereof he spoke; he had profited handsomely that way in the '20s. Indeed, until Lewis in the 1980s, Paddock was the most entrepreneurial sprinter. He was pretty much his own p.r. man, and he would run races over odd distances, establishing records willy-nilly. His amours also kept him in the news. He was engaged to a movie star, Bebe Daniels, and later made the columns when he broke up with another actress, one Madeline Lubetty, who sued Paddock (the cad), demanding $100,000 as what was called in those innocent times “a heart balm.”
Prefiguring the outspoken Lewis, Paddock feuded with the simon-pure track pooh-bahs. They had a conniption when he starred in a movie–The Olympic Hero–getting paid pretty much to play himself. He was suspended twice for breaking rules against making money. Like Lewis, though, Paddock never was silenced. He even began one bylined newspaper article, “Shooting is too good for these officials…”
In the end Paddock suffered the worst–and most sadly ironic–fate of all those in the Fastest club. He’d served on the front lines in France during World War I as an 18-year-old second lieutenant and escaped without a scratch. Then, as a captain in World War II, far from any action, he was a passenger on a military plane that crashed, and Charlie Paddock was dead at age 42.
Still, of all the Fastest, Bullet Bob Hayes has experienced the greatest extremes. Born into segregation, he became the nation’s heroic gold-medalist sprinter in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, an All-Pro in football, then an alcoholic and a convict. Now he sits in his mother’s house in Jacksonville, essentially reborn twice, of body and spirit. When he was paroled from prison in February 1980, wags said it proved he was the World’s Fastest Human, since he did five years in 10 months. But now Hayes really does seem to have outrun both the devil and death.
Last year, at age 59, he suffered from prostate cancer, pneumonia and a weakened heart. His lower body swelled with 73 extra pounds of fluid, and his heart at one point slowed to 12 beats a minute. “That’s like dead,” he says succinctly. The doctors even told Hayes’s sister, Lena Johnson, that they could not do anything more for him. Somehow he recovered, and as he sits among a scatter of hundreds of get-well letters and prayer cards, his legs jiggle constantly, nervously, his sockless sneakered feet shifting as if at any moment he might lift them again and dash out the door.
“I can only believe that I survived because so many people prayed for me, and God got me through,” he says. “Now I’m in His path, but there were so many times when I was on another path. I can’t practice perfection, but I can practice progress, and that’s what I’m doing. Tomorrow is not promised to you, but I’m fortunate, I’m blessed. I’m a miracle. I can see. I can hear. I can walk. I can still run. Not fast, but I can. I can still run.”
When Hayes was young, he may have been the Very Fastest Human Ever. Five-feet-eleven, 190 pounds, no sprinter had been stronger. He wasn’t a bullet at all, more like a mortar. Pigeon-toed, his arms pumping, his spikes tearing holes in the track, Hayes ran, as one coach said, “like he was pounding grapes into wine.” He won 53 straight sprints and took the '64 gold in 10 flat despite running on an inside lane that had been chewed up by the recently concluded 10,000-meter race. He finished seven feet ahead of the runner-up, which, for 100 meters, translates into Secretariat at the Belmont.
A couple of days later, when Hayes took the baton and anchored the 4x100 relay, he flew past a Frenchman who started almost seven yards ahead of him. With the jogging relay start, Hayes ran 8.4, going about 30 mph. Nobody runs the 100 yards anymore–the 100 yards is the Stalin of statistics, having been expunged from record books as if nobody had ever run it–but shhh: In 1963, at the AAU championships, Hayes ran 100 yards in a record 9.1.
Most remarkable, he accomplished all this as a sideline. When Lyndon Johnson called up Jake Gaither, Hayes’s football coach at Florida A&M, and asked him to keep Hayes healthy for the Olympics, Gaither replied, “But Mr. President, Bob is a football player. He just happens to be the World’s Fastest Human.”
Consider: In the 37 years since Tokyo the record has been reduced by 0.21, barely a fifth of a second. “I played football almost half the year,” Hayes says. “I ran cross-country to get in shape. I trained on a clay track. I ate the same food that you do. Maurice seems to be built perfectly. He’s so strong. It’s all so different now.”
Hayes was only 21–years younger than what we now know a sprinter’s prime to be–when he left track to make money at football. We can only speculate what he might have achieved if he hadn’t gone to the Dallas Cowboys and been such a good receiver. Cowboys coach Tom Landry was amazed at his abilities. Dallas running back Calvin Hill asked Hayes why he was the only player whom Landry allowed to call him Tom.
Hayes smiled and said, “Nine-one.”
He still wears his Super Bowl ring and NFC Championship ring. On the wall of his mother’s living room is a huge picture of him in his Cowboys stars–number 22. Elsewhere upon the walls are magazine covers featuring teammates Roger Staubach and Bob Lilly, and what constitutes almost a shrine to Landry. There is little evidence that Hayes ran track. The sport has forgotten Hayes, and that is particularly sad because he never wanted to leave it. “Believe me,” he says, “you would’ve never seen me in a Cowboys uniform if I could’ve made a living running.” He cocks his head and grins. “Why should I get beat up?”
It was also in football–not track–that Hayes encountered drugs. Although he is clean and sober now, and has served his time for trafficking in small amounts of cocaine and methaqualone, he remains tarnished goods. None of the sponsors who trade off Olympic glory, inviting former gold medalists to the Games to mingle with clients, invite Hayes. He was there only once, running.
“My mother was sitting with Jesse Owens and Mrs. Owens,” says Hayes, “and when I won I saw tears running down my mother’s face. And Jesse Owens–he was a real nice guy, a father figure to me–seeing him up there with my mother made me so proud. Then the Japanese emperor put the medal around my neck. It’s the greatest feeling. That flag is flying. They’re playing your national anthem. You realize you represent everyone in your country. Yes, some of them are bigots, and you might not want to represent them, but you do. You see, if you think any different, then you’re going to be like them, aren’t you?”
Bullet Bob sits back in his chair, his legs jiggling faster with the memories of a time when no one on God’s green earth could keep up with him.
GREENE WAS a high school football star, and he says that he, too, would have left sprinting for the gridiron if track hadn’t become at least quasi-pro. Now, just turned 27, he is convinced he can cut the record to 9.76. After all, Greene is positive he had that time made at the Olympic trials last year when he slowed in an early heat and cruised. Of course, maybe you can catch lightning in a bottle only once. Lewis long-jumped 30 feet at Indianapolis in 1982 but was called (inaccurately, it seems) for fouling. It didn’t bother him; he was sure he could do it again sometime. But he never came close.
Smith believes Greene can get the record down to 9.65, which would be shocking, except that Greene was stuck on 10.08 in 1997 until he put everything together and threw off a 9.86. “Fireworks started going off in my head,” he recalls. The impossible dream in sprinting is to sustain speed through all 45 strides. Sprinters reach their top speed in the middle third of the race, eating up more than 12 meters per second, before tailing off. Greene can maintain top speed longer, to about 80 meters out. “I have a gift,” he says.
“You can’t feel yourself slowing down,” Hayes says, “because everybody else is slowing down too.” Even Lewis, a slow starter who ran down opponents, was not really kicking at the end. He was only slowing up less than his rivals. The sprinter’s kick is illusory, like the rising fastball. The trick to reducing the record by anything more than another few hundredths of a second, then, is to find a way for a human to maintain speed for all 100 meters. Smith, the visionary, thinks it’s possible. “Everybody says you’re going to fall apart at the end, but why?” he asks. “Why does it have to be that way?”
Lewis is incredulous. “You do that, then you’re in the eights,” he cries out, wide-eyed.
Apart from reengineering genetics, what more can be done? Besides, at a certain point, each improvement upon the record will be less ado about almost nothing. It is one thing to cut the record from 10.2 to 10.1. But who will care if the World’s Fastest Human does the hundred in 9.744 instead of 9.745? Greene appears to have the perfect body, a wonderful attitude, excellent habits, the best coaching. Smith has never worked an athlete harder, but the only new substantive advice he could offer Greene this year was to make sure he kept his fingers straight out and not clinch his fists. “It can’t be that simple,” Greene says ingenuously, “can it?”
At the top rank, maybe it is. Running better is not like learning a new off-speed pitch or a complicated extra move in the paint. It’s genetics and guts and then one foot before the other. What more simple physical advice can there be? Maybe that’s why so many track coaches tend to sound so orotund. “Feeling running fast is better than thinking running fast,” Smith says. And: “I tell my runners that I’m more interested in how you’re looking and doing than in how fast you’re going.” And: “Get in and clean out the despair and keep the vision clean.” And: “Eat right. Sleep right. Dream correctly.” Dream correctly? “Of course.”
In addition, Smith always reminds Greene not to rush things. That sounds perverse in dealing with speed, but once a sprinter panics and rushes out of kilter, he can’t recover. Lewis believes that because his opponents believed it was so crucial to get out in front, they placed too much emphasis on the start. That idea, Lewis says, still damages the way many sprinters and their coaches prepare. Not Greene. “The one thing I’m capable of,” he says, “is patience. The one time I didn’t take my time was in the 200 trials last year against Michael Johnson. That’s when he’d said in the paper that I wasn’t ready, and I injured myself. But when I run fast, I run outside myself, and I’m not tired at the end.”
He and Smith were walking off the track after a workout in Athens in June, talking speed. What’s the difference between quick and fast? Smith started to pontificate on the subject, but Greene looked at him and shook his head, smiling. Smith shut up. Greene said, “It’s like this: Quick, I can win a race. Fast, I can do some damage.” Smith nodded. That took care of that. Greene smiled his little-boy smile and skipped a step.
Running fast is so elemental. Maybe it is all the more so for Greene, because like most of the World’s Fastest Humans, he is chasing only time. Perhaps that is why Hayes seems most fondly to remember that Olympic relay race, the one occasion when he actually had to beat somebody. Lewis cites the 1991 world championship in Tokyo as his best. He set the record at 9.86, but five others broke 10 seconds, and first Dennis Mitchell, then Burrell, then Lewis led the way. “That was a race,” he says, relishing the memory. “Records that you set in one day shouldn’t matter as much as they’ve come to. It’s like baseball: What wins games over a season is pitching. Someone like Greg Maddux doesn’t look that strong, but over a season…” Lewis let the thought hang for a moment, then finished with a flourish: “I had the best pitching.”
Still, how can we avoid being fascinated by the sheer fastest stuff, the damage? “Speed is uniquely American,” Masback says. “We have a reverence for speed. The trouble is that track is so objective that it may be hard to sustain someone’s interest after he’s broken a record. Everything else seems a comedown.”
Greene is lucky in one important respect. He is saved from being too self-absorbed because he is so involved with his team. HSI is even more sophisticated than the Santa Monica Track Club, which gave Lewis and Burrell the same sort of support and camaraderie. Hudson cannot even sign a new client unless a majority of the members votes for the nominee. HSI is as much club as team.
Greene frequently pauses in his workouts to help lesser HSI athletes. Andrew Miller, the hefty team trainer, watches Greene work with Christine Arron, a world-class sprinter, on her start. “Mo’s really a giving person,” Miller says in genuine admiration.
The World’s Fastest Human is a nice guy, just like many of the common people whom God made slower. At meets, he dashes about the infield, cheering on his teammates. He tutors young Bernard Williams, teaching Williams how to beat him someday, when it is time to pass the torch. At Athens, after meeting with the press following his own race, Greene hurried back near the finish line, where, with Boldon, he sat and waited to greet Arron and Torri Edwards after they had competed in the women’s 100–and console them if they lost.
Away from the track, Greene says, “I just chill out,” enjoying the same kind of activities that most millionaires his age engage in. He plays video games, drives a Mercedes with a license plate that reads MO GOLD and has the obligatory diamond earrings and tattoos we have come to expect from our young athletic stars. He does watch his diet, however, shunning the junk food he was inclined to eat before he fell under Smith’s aegis, and he has shown a creative bent in designing his own posters and a Mo Greene calendar, which can be found on his website (www.mogreene.com).
He has a one-year-old daughter, Ryan Alexandria, from a past relationship. He visits Ryan often in Pasadena, across town from his house in a newer upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, where the roads wind and the houses have Spanish-tile roofs. Inside, his house is dominated by a PlayStation, which his brother and a cousin are enjoying at the moment as Greene shows off his trophies and his website. With major artillery action on the PlayStation, it seems rather like Mo is living in a bowling alley, but he is unfazed.
“If people ask who is the greatest sprinter ever,” he calls out, over the din, “I want to show them a race that is so beautiful that people will remember it forever.”
John Smith says, “I want Mo to run into the horizon, if I may be metaphorical.”
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine…and change–a little less change. But only if you dream correctly.