Saving Steps, He’s Trying to Make Leap

Tonie Campbell is what the fight mob would call “strictly an opponent.”

He is the track-and-field equivalent of that pugilistic staple, the trial horse. He’s good but not too. He’s fast but not fastest. He’s tough, skilled, he gets the most out of what he has. He’s a survivor.

If he were a baseball player, he’d bat second. In football, he’d catch everything thrown to him. There’s a quality of undiscourageability to him. You get what you pay for from Tonie Campbell. He doesn’t sulk, make excuses, complain.

What he does is run an impeccable high-hurdles race every time he suits up. He chases people into world records. He makes every race an honest race.

He’s good. He has rarely been less than third-best in the world in his career. Other guys are faster. But nobody has better technique. Or more dedication.

He has been on three Olympic teams. The first, 1980’s, never went anywhere, thanks to the U.S. boycott. On the second, in Los Angeles, Campbell turned up with impacted wisdom teeth, four of them, and he wound up fifth. On the third, last fall in Seoul, he got the bronze medal.

Tonie has, more or less, always been third banana. When he started hurdling, Renaldo (Skeets) Nehemiah was the wizard of the woods, running world records, culminating in a 12.93 for the 110-meter highs at Zurich in 1981.

When Nehemiah quit to try pro football--disastrously, it turned out--with the San Francisco 49ers, Campbell had Greg Foster to chase. When he began to edge up on Foster, they both suddenly had Roger Kingdom to worry about. Kingdom shocked the track world by winning the gold at Los Angeles in 1984 and then won again at Seoul with the first sub-13-second race in Olympic history, 12.96.

So, Tonie Campbell, probably the most consistent and durable hurdler ever, and probably no worse than the fourth- or fifth-best who ever ran the race, is as overlooked as the guy who played third base in the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield, or Mike Tyson’s sparring partner.

To give you an idea, when Campbell won the world indoor championship in Indianapolis in 1987 in a 60-meter race in which Greg Foster and the Canadian, Mark McKoy, collided and fell, the first TV questions he got were: “Did you get a look at Greg Foster’s fall? Do you think you could have won without that?”

Recalls Campbell: “They thought I should have felt guilty for winning. But I ran 7.51 and the world record was 7.46.”

Outdoor high-hurdling is a 10-jump event that is less a race than a gantlet. Speed is not exactly incidental but it’s not paramount. Campbell initially wanted no part of hurdling.

“I regarded it as a punishment, not a competition,” he says.

He wasn’t quite fast enough, though, to keep up with world-class sprinters. So he reluctantly agreed to try timber-topping.

“The first time I went over, I thought, ‘Wow! This is like flying!’ It was the greatest feeling in the world, those 8/10ths of a second over the board. It was love at first flight.”

As a guy who likes to spend his weekends sky-diving or skin-diving, Campbell gets restless at sea level anyway. At first, the hurdling came easily. Discipline was something else.

“I thought I was a rebel, but I was a jerk,” Tonie admits. “I had no direction. And when kids have no direction, they really find a way to get lost.”

Campbell almost ended up running the streets instead of the hurdles. USC provided his turning point, when it threatened to rescind his track scholarship.

“The university threatened to remove it unless I changed three things: 1. my attitude; 2. my grades; 3. my relationship with my family,” he says.

The usual procedure in a confrontation of this kind is for “friends” to rally around the athlete and say, “They can’t do this to you. Get a lawyer!”

But Campbell is glad he didn’t. He shaped up.

“I’m glad they did it,” he says today. “It brought me up short. It changed my life. I grew up, traveled all over the world, met different people, saw different cultures. If I had dropped out then, I’d probably never have gotten out of Carson and would be living a hard life now.”

He assesses his chances analytically:

“There are three disciplines to hurdling--speed, power and technique. I set out to be as technically perfect as I could be. It was my edge.”

To this day, he can stand in front of a mirror and spot any telltale three-pound bulge in his silhouette. If he does, he hits the salad bar till it comes off. Guys who are strictly opponents can’t make even small mistakes.

But neither do they always remain strictly opponents. Just ask James J. Braddock, Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Balboa.

On Aug. 6, in the Jack In The Box Invitational meet at UCLA’s Drake Stadium, Campbell will be coming to turn Kingdom and Foster into opponents. Tonie, pencil-slim, bespectacled, cannot hope to out-power them but he is working on a new two-step interval, instead of the traditional three, between hurdles. He wants to spend as little time as possible on the ground.

What he’d really like to do is win so often--right up to and in Barcelona in 1992--that when he does mishap, the TV will come up to Kingdom and Foster and say, “Did either of you guys see what in the world happened to Tonie Campbell?”