'Track Sicko'? Inquire Within
Part Two of why I started this publication
Leaving the Los Angeles Times after 19 years was one of the wisest decisions I ever made.
My buyout package allowed our family of four to relocate to my wife’s native Michigan and gave me the chance to transition into a field that let me spend more time with our two children as they grew up.
Stepping down meant departing a sportswriting gig that was the most enjoyable – fun, hectic, unpredictable – job I ever had. It wasn’t easy to leave, but with a five-year-old daughter and one-year-old son, it was worth it to be more present in their lives.
I didn’t know then that I would return years later to do the work I love, covering the sport I love, with this newsletter. Starting Track & Field Informed with Johnny O has me feeling a familiar excitement at watching races and field events, compiling all-time lists, and re-connecting with old friends and colleagues.
By the time I walked away from the Times in 2004, I had covered Allyson Felix’s rise from up-and-coming high school freshman to prep phenom to professional athlete. That year I left she made her first Olympic team at age 18 and won a silver medal in the women’s 200 meters in the Games in Athens.
The year before I saw Felix take a big step to becoming a pro when she set a national high school record of 22.51 seconds in the 200 while defeating a heavyweight field of professional competitors in the Mt. San Antonio College Relays — also known as Mt. SAC — always one of my favorite meets to cover.
My beginnings at the Times weren’t quite so heady.
My boss hired me for my numbers sense but also because he needed a “track sicko” on staff, he said, although I wouldn’t get to bring out that side for a while. My early days were spent learning the ropes of entry level, taking phone results and compiling stats.
I wrote in part 1 of this story about my sometimes over-the-top boyhood love of sports and track and field, so I was ecstatic to get the job and felt like the luckiest guy in the world walking into the building for my first day on September 13, 1985.
The first three to four hours of my 5-11 shift involved taking phone calls from people reporting results of high school sports such as girls’ golf, tennis, and volleyball, along with boys’ water polo, and an occasional cross-country meet.
I had been forewarned things would get much busier around 9 p.m. when freelance writers would start calling to dictate box scores for high school football games, as well as several paragraphs for various round-ups.
Still I was not prepared for the controlled chaos that broke out as calls flooded in. Several of us working the shift would answer a call, take the line score and dictation from the reporter, then grab another call waiting on hold.
At 9:45, my task shifted to compiling box scores for the agate pages, all under deadline pressure to get copy released so the presses could start on time.
I began to look forward to the challenge of it all. We felt a collective sense of accomplishment following the manic pace of putting our section to bed, and often afterward a bunch of us would head to a local watering hole to unwind.
As the years went by my responsibilities grew. I covered high school football or basketball games on Friday nights, keeping stats and grabbing interviews, writing my story in an office on a very primitive laptop device and using acoustic couplers to send the copy through a phone line.
There were other times when—unable to get into an office—I ended up writing my story in the stands and running to the nearest pay phone to file it. Problems arose if I got to a pay phone with students waiting in line. Sometimes I offered money to cut in front so I could file my story on time.
My boss hired me for my numbers sense but also because he needed a “track sicko” on staff, he said.
It seemed like a minor miracle to me the first time I filed a story from a company car in San Diego while covering the Foot Locker cross-country championships at Balboa Park.
High school track became my first beat, and I covered it with a passion most sportswriters reserved for football, basketball and baseball. I covered my first meet at my alma mater – Kennedy High School in Granada Hills – with the added bonus of interviewing my old coach, Pete Nelson.
I reported on dual meets, invitationals, and the state championships, in addition to writing features on top performers. But I made my biggest mark compiling and regularly publishing a list of area high school track and field leaders that went 20 to 25 competitors deep in each of the 16 boys’ and girls’ events.
Local high school coaches and athletes loved the lists and more than one college coach told me they simplified recruiting.
One of the first standouts I covered when I took over the beat in 1986 was Quincy Watts, a Taft High sophomore who topped those lists in the boys’ 100 (10.56 seconds) and 200 (20.97).
Watts had a mixture of size (6-3, 185 pounds), power, grace, competitiveness and coolness that is extremely rare. He would go on to set two Olympic records in the 400 and run a leg on the world-record setting 1,600 relay team in the 1992 Games in Barcelona.
It was thrilling to witness the growth of Watts and other Olympians-to-be, including Felix and before that Marion Jones, who was an electric performer as a high school superstar in the early 90s long before her Olympic legacy was destroyed by a doping scandal.
Yet some of my most indelible memories involve athletes reaching their zenith in high school or college who did not go pro – individuals who never became household names but whose accomplishments illuminate the human spirit nonetheless.
Some of my most indelible memories involve athletes who never became household names but whose accomplishments illuminate the human spirit nonetheless.
Jeff Nadeau was a three-sport athlete at Monroe High who was committed to play football at the University of Arizona when I saw him incredibly raise his personal best in the high jump from 6 feet 8 inches (2.08 meters) to 7-2¼ (2.19) in one meet in 1993.
Nadeau often jumped off a grass take-off area while competing in the high jump so it did not surprise me when he cleared a personal best of 6-9 (2.06) on his third – and final – attempt in a meet at Birmingham High, which had a large tartan apron. I figured he would miss three times at the ensuing height of 6-10 (2.08), but he cleared the bar on this third attempt, and did likewise at 6-11 (2.11), 7-0 (2.13), 7-1¼ (2.16), and 7-2¼ (2.19).
Most fascinating about Nadeau’s performance, which included a staggering 27 attempts, was the fact he clobbered the bar on his first try at every height at 6-9 or higher. He then had solid second attempts when he brushed the bar off with his calves before clearing it cleanly on his third effort.
“I guess I got kind of lucky,” he said at the time. “I’m not sure what to say. I mean, I felt good today, but I would have been happy just to clear 6-9 or 6-10.”
Nadeau would win the Los Angeles City Section title, State Championships, and Golden West Invitational during the following month, but none of those performances amazed me like what he did that day. His City Section record still stands.
Then there were the stories that transcended the world of sports and athletic competition.
Kim Mortensen was a star runner at Thousand Oaks High who won the Foot Locker cross-country title as a senior in December of 1995, set a national high school record of 9 minutes 48.59 seconds in the girls’ 3,200 meters in May of 1996, and was selected as national female athlete of the year by Track & Field News.
Her time crushed the previous national outdoor record by more than 11 seconds, was nearly four seconds faster than the indoor best, and would not be bettered until 2017.
However, I got the opportunity to see a more vulnerable side of her in the summer of 1998 when she agreed to let me write a story about her battle with anorexia.
Mortensen was very candid about her disease. She traced its origins to the summer between her junior and senior year at Thousand Oaks when she began to cut fatty foods out of her diet while increasing the intensity of her training so she could have a senior season she “could be proud of.”
She felt empowered by the discipline needed to stick to her new diet, and she dramatically improved her performances during cross-country season. But things spun out of control as she became more restrictive about food, cutting things such as granola bars and several types of nuts from her diet because they contained small amounts of fat.
“I just felt so scared because I was so controlled about my eating,” Mortensen said “I wanted to be able to have less restraints on what I ate, but I couldn’t. It was torture.”
Her mom, a former anorexic, tried to get Kim to eat more but to no avail. And though she was struggling internally, the 95-pound Mortensen’s performances continued to improve for quite a while. She was regarded among the top four or five collegiate cross-country runners in the nation as a freshman at UCLA before her season ended with a disappointing 27th place finish in a qualifying meet for the NCAA championships.
A hamstring injury hampered Mortensen in that race, but she felt listless in the week leading up to it and figured that was her body’s way of telling her it had had enough.
She sat out her freshman track season after her weight dropped to 87 pounds, but posted a win and a second-place finish in her first two cross-country races as a sophomore before being sidelined by a stress fracture in her lower back, an injury that typically occurs in elderly women, not athletes who are 19.
The injury forced Mortensen to confront her anorexia and take a break from running to focus on her health. Her story was a reminder that no matter how invincible an athlete might look in competition, they have human frailties just like the rest of us.
No matter how invincible an athlete might look in competition, they have human frailties just like the rest of us.
Finally, in a strange sense, it was a different sport – softball – that ultimately closed the book on my LA Times career. In 1993, at a media softball tournament, I met the woman I would marry four years later.
Brenda worked in a Times office in Ventura County and like many news reporters was none-too-fond of the loud crew that made up most sports departments, but she agreed to play on the co-ed team I was managing in a tournament of news, radio and television rivals, even though we did not know each other.
We got off to a bumpy start when my team nearly forfeited the first game because Brenda – our third of three required female players – arrived nine minutes late, one minute before the grace period expired. She also forgot her entry fee for the tournament.
She redeemed herself a few days later by sending the entry fee through interoffice mail, with a humorous list of “Top 10 Reasons I went 0-for-10 with three strikeouts” (after initially telling me she’d been a solid player in high school). The rest, as they say, is history. We fell in love.
While not a track and field fan, Brenda came to appreciate my knowledge and memory of the sport. She even wrote a tongue-in-cheek cartoon character named Stat Boy after we sat in a bar in San Francisco watching live but muted coverage of Michael Johnson’s legendary world-record 200 in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
First we had to ask the bartender to change the channel to the Olympics, after which I served as the announcer introducing Brenda to the competitors in each lane as they lined up, and then breathlessly calling the race.
Back in the car, heading to my sister Theresa’s wedding in Lake Tahoe, Brenda wrote of Stat Boy: “Smarter than a Nobel laureate/ more powerful than a TI-84/ able to convert feet to meters with no calculator/ Look! Up in the stands! / It’s a Nerd!/ It’s a Brain!/ It’s STAT BOY!”
It’s hard to believe this year marks our 25th wedding anniversary, and we’ve raised two amazing kids. Now I am reentering the track and field world to begin anew just as Allyson Felix is writing the final chapter of her remarkable career.
I figured Felix would one day contend for medals in the Olympic Games and World Championships. But I did not foresee her becoming the most decorated track and field athlete in U.S. history—a five-time Olympian, member of nine U.S. World Championships teams, and winner of 11 Olympic and 16 World Championship medals.
How inspiring it has been to watch her evolve into a worldwide track and field icon and an entrepreneur who uses her platform to draw attention to societal inequities, such as the disproportionate rate of complications that Black women experience in pregnancy.
As for me, I have no illusions about what is ahead as I embark on this new adventure. I am a small fish in a big track and field journalism pond at the moment, and it will take hard work and patience to grow this endeavor, but I am energized by the prospect.
It will take hard work and patience to grow this endeavor, but I am energized by the prospect.
Next month I plan to visit my native California to report on the Mt. SAC Relays, and in July I will attend the World Championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, when the global title meet that began in 1983 will be held in the U.S. for the first time.
I figure I have covered more than 70 cross-country and track and field meets at Mt. SAC through the years, but the World Championships will mark the first time I have been to historic Hayward Field at the University of Oregon.
I expect a lot of warm memories to come rushing back when I arrive at Mt. SAC’s Hilmer Lodge Stadium 18 years on from my last visit, and my emotions will no doubt get the better of me when I walk up to the venerable Hayward Field for the first time.
Though one venue will be familiar and the other new, I expect to feel at home in both places, for I will be there to do the work I was meant to do. Thank you for reading and subscribing, and I appreciate you sharing these posts far and wide with others who might be interested.
Now let’s get started! Watch for my official launch this Wednesday, March 9.
Track & Field Informed with Johnny O
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Dad and I love your writing style!! You have lots of heart and soul! Looking forward to reading more!
Great informative stuff, with a little nostalgia, written in good ol’ fashion journalistic style, pre-gonzo, and grammatically correct, rarities in today’s internet world.