God’s car alarm is going off, or so it seems. Every few seconds a piercing honk pushes past the eardrums of those in attendance and enters their brain. This is done on purpose so that the men and women on the Baylor University track team have a better sense of their pacing.
It’s only April, but already the steamy air hints of the long, hot summer and the big, nasty mosquitoes ahead. A Union Pacific freight train rumbles and clanks along the adjacent railroad tracks–a tortoise to the hares inside Baylor Track Stadium, located in the deceptively named Beverly Hills area of Waco, Texas. It is a place with streets so mean that God would probably hesitate before parking here. It is the place where the greatest athlete in the world trains.
By all rights, Michael Johnson belongs in the other Beverly Hills. At 28 he is the reigning world champion in both the 200 meters and the 400 meters, two races as different as, say, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. One is lightning, the other thunder. Yet Johnson has won 18 straight 200s–make that 19–and 51 consecutive 400s–make that 52–and this July he will attempt to become the first man to win the 200 and the 400 in the same Summer Games. Olympic and international track officials had to rearrange the schedule to accommodate Johnson, but the payoff for both him and them could be immense: acclaim as the next Jesse Owens, the rebirth of track and, oh, yes, gazillions of dollars.
But on this April afternoon, Johnson is just one of the many charges of Baylor coach Clyde Hart, who, come to think of it, looks like the Old Testament version of God as track coach. “Let me see it,” Hart says to Johnson as the runner takes the track in his new U.S.A. unitard. “What do you think of it?” Johnson asks Hart. “Well,” says the coach, “I think the U.S.A. insignia is too subtle and the Nike swoosh is too bright. But that’s the point, I guess.” Just then another of Hart’s runners, Marlon Ramsey, walks by. “Look, it’s Superman,” Ramsey says to Johnson, one of his probable partners on the U.S. 4 x 400-m relay team in Atlanta. “But, hey, what happened to your cape?”
Johnson may seem like Superman on the track, but he is decidedly Clark Kent off it. “He hasn’t changed a bit since he came to me as a freshman,” says Hart, who has been coaching at Baylor for 33 years. “Good head on his shoulders, great work ethic even then. His parents did an excellent job of raising him.”
Indeed, one of the reasons Johnson flies faster than anyone else is that he is so well grounded. He grew up in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, the son of Paul Johnson, a truck driver, and Ruby Johnson, a teacher. They instilled in Michael and his brother and three sisters a sense of discipline and an appreciation for learning. “My folks,” says Michael, “are the kind of people who wouldn’t want you to make too much of their influence. They would say they were just doing their job, and they would be right. It tells you something about today’s world that parents who make their children sit down and do their homework are considered extraordinary.”
As Johnson’s Skyline High School track coach, Joel Ezar, recalls, “He came to me in his junior year, and he looked more like a Rhodes scholar than a track athlete. He had horn-rimmed glasses and a briefcase and a tie. After he won a few races, I asked one of the kids, ‘Who was that?’ He said, ‘That’s Michael.’ And I said, ‘Michael who?’ That’s when I started to look closely at this nerdy kid.” That sort of characterization does not sit particularly well with Johnson, who says, “Coach Ezar always makes too much of that nerd stuff. The truth is that looking nice was the style then. I like my clothes, always have.”
As a runner, Johnson began to blossom in his senior year, though he was still only the third best sprinter in Texas upon graduation. When Hart recruited Johnson for Baylor, located 100 miles south of Dallas, the coach thought he was just getting another runner for his 4 x 100-m relay team. “I didn’t see him as a Southwest Conference champion, much less a national champion,” says Hart. “But it’s not the first time I was wrong, or the last.” Johnson might have made the 1988 Olympic team as a sophom*ore, but he suffered a stress fracture in one leg. The next year a pulled quadriceps caused him to miss most of the outdoor season. “The adversity helped him,” says Hart. “He was like hammered steel.” Johnson stayed healthy in 1990 and began a 47-race winning streak (31 in the 200 and 16 in the 400) that carried him to the 1991 world championship in the 200. At the Olympic trials in ’92, he ran the 200 in 19.79 seconds, the fastest time in four years, and he seemed poised for stardom in Barcelona. But then he got food poisoning in Salamanca, Spain, two weeks before the Games and never fully recovered. He failed even to qualify for the finals of the 200, though he did get a gold medal as part of the 4 Û 400-m relay team. All because of something he ate. “Everything happens for a reason,” says Johnson.
If the reason was to make Johnson train even harder, extend himself even further, then that bad clam or whatever it was in Salamanca succeeded. Ever since Barcelona, Johnson has been on a mission to prove himself the fastest in the world in both the 200 and the 400. To the uninitiated, the 200/400 double sounds no more difficult than the more common 100/200 or 400/800 combinations. “The 200 and 400 are totally different animals,” says Hart. If the 200 is a race that goes to the swiftest, the 400 goes to the smartest and strongest. Johnson, in fact, embodies those superlatives–his physique suggests a linebacker recently converted from wide receiver.
No man has ever been able to bridge that gap between the last sprint and the first middle-distance race, although one woman, Valerie Brisco-Hooks, did win the 200 and the 400 in the ’84 Los Angeles Games. But as the sign in the trainer’s room at the track stadium says, PEOPLE WHO SAY IT CANNOT BE DONE SHOULD NOT INTERRUPT THOSE WHO ARE DOING IT.
At the world track-and-field championships last August in Gothenburg, Sweden, Johnson did something they said couldn’t be done. After running in three 400 preliminaries, he won–and nearly broke the world record in–the 400 on a Wednesday. Then he ran three 200 prelims before winning–and nearly breaking the world record in–the 200 on Friday. He topped it all off by anchoring the victorious U.S. 4 x 400-m relay team on Sunday. Asked whether the Olympic schedule would be changed to accommodate Johnson’s double dare, Primo Nebiolo, the president of the International Amateur Athletics Federation, said, “If he wanted to run backward, he could do it.”
There are those who think Johnson lacks a certain charisma. All right, it’s Carl Lewis. The popular sprinter and long jumper was quoted last year on the lack of excitement in track, saying, “Michael Johnson, he doesn’t have it.” To which Johnson says, unexcitedly, “Well, Carl and I don’t get along very well.”
Actually, Johnson did try some half-hearted showmanship last June, waving during the last few strides of his 400 victory in the U.S. nationals. Some say it cost him the world record (43.29); the actual world-record holder, Butch Reynolds, finished an angry second because he thought Johnson was trying to show him up. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Europeans, who are more appreciative of track than Americans, love Johnson. The French, in fact, call him “Magique” Johnson. Yet in the U.S., Johnson gets less ink than the latest winner on the Senior Golf Tour. Walk through the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, and you can find no fewer than six books about the Dallas Cowboys, including one by the immortal safety, Bill Bates. No sign of “Magique” Johnson, even though he lives in the vicinity.
The lack of recognition of Johnson is a mystery. His feats alone would demand attention. He is gracious with the press, and he even has something to offer in the way of hobbies. Johnson, for instance, is simpatico with all things motorized. His most cherished memory of Gothenburg was not the 200 victory or the 400, but rather the tour of the Volvo factory, when he was able to test-drive cars and trucks. He also likes to play tennis, and he must be a sight to see going back on lobs. Given all that, Michael Johnson isn’t even the first name associated with Waco.
Most people would ask, Why Waco? Johnson asks, Why not? He could have succumbed to the allures of such track havens as ucla, but he prefers the serenity of Baylor and the counsel of Coach Hart. “To tell you the truth,” says Johnson, “I never even thought about moving.” There is also a practical side to training here–Waco in the summer is even stickier than Atlanta.
A few hundred yards from the track is the Baylor football stadium, an imposing structure obviously well fed by alumni. Inside the lobby is a small display case devoted to Michael Johnson’s exploits, and seated in one of the plush chairs near the shrine is Johnson. He is friendly and modest and in no particular hurry. “Jesse Owens is my idol, but please don’t compare me to him,” he says. “I don’t face the same pressures he did.”
But then, just when you think you are in Smallville with Clark Kent, the man figuratively rips open his shirt to reveal his true identity. Asked if there’s another challenge beyond Atlanta, Johnson says, “Well, actually, I’ve been thinking about adding the 100 meters to my repertoire.”
Anybody want to tell him that it can’t be done?
