Hines Talking a Great Race These Days : Track: Former Olympic champion and world-record holder holds little respect for today’s top sprinters and for the leaders of the 1968 boycott movement he says cost him endorsement dollars.

Out of the past came the runners, around the last turn of the relay--4 x 100 they called it--for Jim Hines to take the baton for the anchor leg by memory. Once he was the World’s Fastest Human--still is, in his own words.

He had ground to make up. He couldn’t wait any longer. So he pulled a baton out of the back of his shorts and took off. Give him credit, he made up a lot of that ground.

“I am still the greatest sprinter,” crowed Hines, 44. “I respect the others, but I’ll beat Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson at 50 yards. Set up the race.”

Not everything Jim Hines says is intended to be taken at face value, any more than he thinks the softening of his waistline and his diminishing hairline could pass for the portrait of 1968 when he won gold medals in 100 meters and the sprint relay in the Mexico City Olympics.

He was in New York this week to celebrate in advance the return of the national track and field championships to Randalls Island on June 12-15 for the first time since 1966.

Hines won there--and just about every place else those years.

“I am the original World’s Fastest,” he said. “I won 99% of my races in the 100. Nobody ever did that.”

There is no way to look up a record like that, but he couldn’t have missed by much. Charlie Greene beat him a couple of times but was third when Hines set a world record in the Olympics. Hines’ 100-meter record of 9.95 seconds at Mexico City stood until 1983.

“In the relay I was sixth when I took the baton,” he said. “My leg of 8.4 is the fastest ever timed.”

Two gold medals and he feels he was obscured and forgotten--cheated, perhaps--by the events of 1968. On that he isn’t kidding.

Mexico City ’68 was the Olympics of the partial black boycott and the raised black-gloved fists of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the 200-meter victory stand while the National Anthem was played.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known as Lew Alcindor then, declined to play on the U. S. team as several groups urged black athletes to reject the Games in protest of racial conditions in the United States.

Hines rejected the boycott.

“That was the greatest team in the history of the Olympics,” he said. “The demonstration is the most remembered thing of ’68. I hate it.”

He recalled that there had been no meeting, no vote and that Smith and Carlos represented only themselves.

“America thought we knew about it,” Hines said. “There were 48 blacks on the team and two knew it was going to happen.

“Most of us felt the best way a black athlete could make a statement was by going and doing his best. Tommie and John felt what they were doing was for all black athletes and black men in America. They didn’t think it out.

“When you win a gold medal, you don’t have to say anything or you can speak your mind. Nobody can take it away.”

From a personal standpoint, Hines thinks the reaction to the demonstration cost him whatever endorsement money was around in 1968. He questions whether Smith and Carlos, who took their trademark shoes onto the stand, had as much interest in making a social statement as they did in the financial competition between shoe companies for publicity.

Hines said the key to the boycott was Harry Edwards, now a consultant to the NFL and other sports organizations on racial matters.

“He was the only one who capitalized on it; we got the backlash,” Hines said. “Black men who went for jobs that week got hurt.”

In the Olympic Village that week a number of black athletes told Soviet and East German athletes not to take Smith and Carlos as representative of their sense of national pride.

“We talked,” Hines said. “The damage had been done.”

Perhaps those demonstrations ultimately helped the United States change some of its racial perceptions. Hines concedes that although he didn’t get the rewards of his triumphs then, today’s scene is vastly improved.

“Tenfold,” Hines said. “All the stuff Bo Jackson does for Nike, no way he’d get that in ’68.”

He said his own long-run benefits are just coming through. After 20 years as a social worker in Oakland, he recently established the Jim Hines Foundation to help minority youth and elderly--all with private funding.

“It’s very legit,” he said.

He has been around a lot of blocks since the time in the spotlight of the Olympics. He was on the development lists and taxi squads of the NFL for seven years after being drafted by the Dolphins in the sixth round, but he played only parts of one season.

He said it is only a matter of time before he is mayor of Oakland, perhaps 1994. He “tested the political waters” before dropping out of the primaries.

“I could have won,” he said, “but they didn’t want a party man and I didn’t want to give up partying.”

Which brought him back to Mexico City and how he left the Village after the trials to spend the night in a hotel with his wife and champagne.

“They told me not to sleep with her,” he said. “Those other guys tossed and turned all night and spent all their energy being nervous. I went to the finals the next day relaxed and well-rested and set the world record.”

He said he has scorn for Ben Johnson because he took steroids and little regard for Carl Lewis “because he doesn’t respect me or Hayes or Jesse Owens, only himself. He couldn’t come close to me or Hayes or Charlie Greene. Set up the race.”

“Listen to him,” said Willie Davenport, gold medalist in the 110-meter high hurdles in ’68. “Jimmy, you couldn’t even warm up with those guys.”