College Track and Field : Bruins Draw Pair of Aces to Tie LSU, 77-77, and Save Unbeaten Streak

With its five-year unbeaten streak in jeopardy, the UCLA men’s track and field team couldn’t have asked for a much better situation than to have a couple of ready and willing Olympians on the sidelines. But the sidelines is where Steve Lewis and Mike Marsh would have stayed Saturday had they waited for their coaches to call.

Lewis, who is so impatient that he couldn’t even wait until his 20th birthday to win two Olympic gold medals, acted.

“I’m going to run,” he told Marsh, sitting down on the track at Drake Stadium to change into his running shoes only minutes before the final event of the afternoon, the 1,600-meter relay, was to be held in a close dual meet against Louisiana State.

“If you’re going to run, so am I,” Marsh said. “I’ve got your back.”

Translated, that meant that Marsh, the second runner on the Bruins’ relay team, would give Lewis a cushion so that he wouldn’t have to test his sore hamstring by going all out on the anchor leg. That was somewhat presumptuous of Marsh since he also has been suffering from a sore hamstring. Neither was expected to be of much use to the Bruins Saturday.

Marsh, an alternate on the U.S. 400-meter relay team at Seoul, ran a personal best 400 of 45.9 seconds, and Lewis, running a cautious 46.5, carried the baton across the finish line with a couple of steps to spare over LSU’s Dino Napier.

That gave UCLA the five points it needed to tie LSU, 77-77. Earlier in the day, the Bruins clinched a dual-meet victory over Houston, 97-57, to equal the school winning streak of 42 set between 1972 and 1976. A victory over LSU would have broken the record.

The Bruins, National Collegiate Athletic Assn. champions the last two years, haven’t lost a dual meet since April 7, 1984.

The dual meet between the women from UCLA and LSU was expected to be almost as close.

But the Bruins scored heavily in field events and distance races to win easily over LSU, 85-51. They also beat Houston, 92-43.

Those were UCLA Coach Bob Kersee’s second and third most significant victories of the day. Among the crowd of about 2,000 spectators at Drake Stadium was sprinter Angela Burnham of Oxnard’s Rio Mesa High School, Track & Field News’ female high school athlete of the year as a junior in 1988. Before leaving the stadium Saturday, she signed a letter of intent to enroll at UCLA.

Also in the crowd was Loren Seagrave, the coach who is given credit for the LSU women’s four NCAA championships--two indoors and two outdoors--since 1987. After informing LSU officials of an all-night counseling session with one of his women athletes, Seagrave was fired Wednesday.

He and the athlete said that he was helping her with personal problems and that sex wasn’t involved, although he admitted hugging and kissing her on the cheek in a comforting manner.

“I cannot tolerate my coaches spending all-night sessions with the opposite sex hugging and kissing,” LSU athletic director Joe Dean said.

So Seagrave paid his way to Los Angeles to be with the team that he still considers his, even staying at LSU’s Brentwood hotel. Almost as if nothing had happened, he wandered around the stadium Saturday, videotaping the sprinters and hurdlers that he coached and giving them tips when they went into the stands to find him.

If his athletes were distracted by the controversy, they didn’t show it. That was particularly true of sprinter Dawn Sowell, who ran the second fastest time ever in a collegiate dual meet in the 100 meters with a 11.10, won the 200 meters in a school record 22.85 and anchored the winning 400-meter relay team.

The most productive athlete of the day was Houston’s Leroy Burrell, who won the 100, 200 and long jump and anchored the winning 400-meter relay team.