Nicknames Vanished, but Fast Times Didn’t

Back in the days when a movie star could be known as America’s Sweetheart, a home-run hitter as the Sultan of Swat, and a champion prizefighter as a Manassa Mauler, it was customary to hail a guy who won two races in a row in this country as the world’s fastest human.

Usually, this was a guy who was an undergraduate at USC, probably white, a Californian and hand-timed.

Charley Paddock was the first. A sickly child whose family moved him to California from Texas to save his life, he became one of the most durable sprinters of all time, competing in three Olympics--1920, ’24 and ‘28--despite a running style that one critic dismissed as “a guy trying to get away from a biting dog.”

But those were hyperbolic times. Football players were Galloping Ghosts or Four Horsemen, after all, and a tennis players might be known as Le Crocodile.

But the last time USC had a “world’s fastest human” was just after the war. This would be Melvin Emery Patton, Pell Mel to the poets of the press box of the day, a stylish runner who brought something new to the sprints--a finishing kick and a stomach so queasy that he frequently threw up at the finish of a race, if not the start.

“It was a funny thing,” Mel Patton was recalling the other day. “I never threw up after the 100 and I threw up after the 200 if the time had been 20.7 or less. My stomach seemed to know before the timer did. If I had run a 21-second race I was all right. Anything under that and I had to run under the stands right away.”

Mel Patton became the logical successor to Charley Paddock one May afternoon in 1948 when he broke the world record for the 100 with a 9.3 clocking that was to stand for 13 years until Frank Budd broke it with a 9.2 in 1961.

Setting a record has never been a guarantee of success in the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games have never been kind to record setters or to world’s fastest humans, for that matter. Budd never got a medal of any kind and the record-holder who succeeded him, Harry Jerome, of Canada, managed only a bronze before he retired.

Paddock, for all of his exploits under a clock, managed only a gold in the 100 in 1920. He got shuffled all the way back to fifth in that race in 1924 when Harold Abrahams, the runner who inspired the movie “Chariots of Fire,” ran him clear out of the medals.

Paddock was not much more successful in his other specialty, the 200. He managed a second in it in 1920 and, in 1924, he took his eye off the finish line long enough to look back and see where everyone was. Jackson Scholz, it so happened, was right there, and he shot past the world’s fastest human at the wire.

One gold and two silvers were not bad but were under-achievements for a man who was fifths of a second--there were no tenths in times then--better than his opposition in non-Olympic years.

It was not really an anomaly, it was a pattern. In the 1960s, Jim Ryun was the greatest miler the world had ever seen and had the times to prove it. But he was able to stagger only to a silver medal in the rarefied air of Mexico City and did a belly flop on the track at Munich in 1972 in a heat.

In 1960, in Rome, Ray Norton was considered as sure a thing as a death scene in an opera when he showed up for the sprints with the best times anyone had run that year. Ray not only finished dead last in both the 100 and 200, he was guilty of a bad baton pass in the relay. That caused his otherwise victorious team, which, by the way, included Frank Budd, to be disqualified.

It seemed for a time in London in 1948 as if Mel Patton was going to step into the same hole and disappear.

He had finished second in the trials to the venerable Barney Ewell--he was 31--in the 100, but nobody took too much notice. The idea in the trials, of course, is to make the boat, not the tape.

But when he finished a trailing fifth in the finals at Wembley, a pall seemed to settle over his supporters.

In point of fact, Mel’s poor performance not only cost him the gold, it also cost Barney Ewell. Ewell was so worried about the competition from Patton that he concentrated all his energies in being sure he defeated Mel. He did. But when he threw his hands up in exultation, he discovered that the hurdler, Harrison Dillard, in this race on a pass, had nosed him out in the outside lane.

The jinx seemed to be holding fast. But, then, Patton, changing his strategy at the last minute to “kick” 20 yards sooner than he normally did, ran past Ewell to win the 200 and get his gold medal.

It seemed for a while as if it was a good thing he did. In Ewell’s last chance for a gold, the relay, the British officials at first ruled that the Americans had passed the baton outside the passing zone. A check of the films proved otherwise, but it was months before the reinstated Americans got their gold medals.

So, it may be just as well that the world’s fastest human sobriquet has been retired, along with the Manassa Maulers and Galloping Ghosts. No one calls Carl Lewis the world’s fastest human, even though he undoubtedly is.

But what’s gone largely is the inspiration for it. Collegiate track, which was the spawning ground for world’s fastest humans, has fallen into somewhat disrepair at USC, and the dual meet, once the bread and butter of the track program, has all but disappeared.

They hope to begin to mend that Saturday when the first collegiate track meet of any kind since 1974 is held at the Coliseum, a dual meet between USC and UCLA.

“The dual meet was where you honed your skills and the team atmosphere was important to get the adrenaline pumping,” Patton recalls. “It was really what track and field was all about. I got some of my best performances in dual meets. We would draw 47,000 people in the Coliseum.”

There will be far fewer than that in the revival of the USC-UCLA dual meet competition in the Coliseum Saturday but Patton, for one, is glad to see the concept restored. Why not? Maybe, there’s a world’s fastest human out there.

If so, if he has the speed for it, we have the adjectives. Like dual meets, they can be dusted off and reused.