Turning THE Corner : Former Taft Standout Watts Puts Distance Between Adversity En Route to Olympics

When Quincy Duswaan Watts visualizes the 400-meter Olympic finals, he doesn’t try to picture himself bursting out of the blocks. Or whipping through the first turn. Or churning down the homestretch.

His daydream is merely an image, one frozen tableaux: Quincy Watts, crossing the finish line first. Ahead of . . . who knows? With a time of . . . who knows? Did he surge from behind? Did he lead all the way? Maybe. He isn’t sure.

But this much is certain: In his mind’s eye, the Q wins the gold. Every time.

“I don’t know what happens at the beginning of the race,” he says. “I don’t know what happens at the middle of the race. I just imagine the finish. That’s what counts.”

He’s right, in a way. If Watts does not cross the finish line first next month in Barcelona, few will recall what happened to him during the final race, during the qualifying heats, during the Olympic trials.

Even fewer will recall what happened to him earlier--growing up on the hopeless streets of Detroit, struggling academically at Taft High, battling injuries at USC, changing events 15 months before Barcelona.

But that counts too. And Quincy Watts knows it.

“I could be dead right now,” Watts says. “I could be on drugs. I could be in jail.”

The words flow matter-of-factly, and it’s tempting to shrug them off with similar nonchalance. Watts is so easygoing, so soft-spoken, so clean-cut. He has such a baby face, such an engaging smile, such a powerful, graceful physique.

And his life is so perfect now. He’s 22 years old, and he’s Barcelona-bound. He’s on the verge of signing a lucrative endorsement contract with Nike. He’s surrounded by close friends and relatives he can trust. Next fall, he should become the first member of his family to graduate from college.

It is nearly impossible to imagine Quincy Watts on the death/drugs/jail track. But less than 10 years ago, he was hanging with the wrong crowd, cutting school, getting suspended.

Tragedy seems to have a special affinity for poor black kids from Detroit. At least four of Watts’ friends from the Motor City are drug addicts. Another boyhood pal was recently sent to jail for opening fire in a shopping mall.

Watts’ 10-year-old cousin is embroiled in the Detroit juvenile court system after shooting his probation officer in the face. Ten-year-old kids aren’t supposed to have probation officers, much less shoot them.

So when Watts says that he considers himself lucky, that he’s glad to be here, he isn’t just spouting athletic cliches.

“If I hadn’t gotten out of Detroit, you never would have heard of Quincy Watts,” he says. “I’m sure I would have fallen by the wayside. What was there in Detroit to make me choose some other path?”

Watts was lucky to escape. In the spring of 1984, Allidah Hunt decided that her problem child needed a male role model, a man who could impose some discipline into his unruly life. Quincy’s father, Rufus Watts, a postal clerk from Woodland Hills, was eager to be that man.

“Quincy was giving her so many problems,” says Rufus, 47. “I just said, ‘Send him to me. I’ll turn him around.’ Since then, I’ve spent every second I could with Quincy. I’ve been there for the bitter and the sweet.”

There has been plenty of both.

During Quincy’s first summer in California, after watching Carl Lewis win four gold medals in Los Angeles, he told his father that someday, Quincy Watts would be the fastest man in the world.

It was a bold prediction for a 14-year-old, especially one who had never paid much attention to sports. But less than two years later, Watts had recorded a 10.56 in the 100, a 20.97 in the 200. By the end of his junior year at Taft, Watts had won three state sprint titles, and Track & Field News had rated him the nation’s top schoolboy sprinter in both events.

“When Quincy was young, he just ran off God’s gift,” says John Smith, his current coach. “He didn’t know about training or preparation or pressure. He just ran. And let me tell you, he was a beautiful runner. He was the stuff. “

Academically, though, Watts struggled. The streets of Detroit provide an education of sorts--but not this sort. He was woefully unprepared for Taft’s course work and was academically ineligible for athletics for part of his freshman year.

“I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” Rufus says. “If he wasn’t doing the right thing in the classroom, I’d be all over him. I knew he had a chance to get a college scholarship, and I wasn’t gonna let him miss that opportunity.”

When Quincy got a D on a weekly progress report, Rufus held him out of a basketball game. When Quincy needed help preparing for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, Rufus stretched his post office salary to hire tutors.

By his senior year, Watts, a corpse-in-waiting only a few years earlier, had everything going his way. He was getting by in the classroom. He was a Times’ All-Valley selection in basketball. He was All-Everything in track.

Then he tore his right hamstring in the spring of his senior year.

The next year, as a freshman at USC, he tore it again.

The next year, as a Trojan sophomore, he strained his left hamstring.

He returned to the track later in the season. And strained his left hamstring again.

Track followers began to wonder whether Quincy Watts, at 19, was a has-been. And Quincy Watts was beginning to wonder too. “That was the low point,” Rufus says. “Quincy’s been through a lot of adversity, but that was the worst. He really had to dig down deep that time.”

When Quincy hit the depths of rehabilitation frustration, Rufus bought him cards adorned with hokey inspirational messages: To succeed you need backbone, not wishbone . . . . Being the best means doing the things you hate to do when you need to do them . . . . It’s cloudy right now, but if you work hard, the sun will shine again .

So Quincy kept working. He also walked on the USC football team in 1990 as a wide receiver, hoping to regain his competitive intensity. Quincy never caught a pass, but football helped him out of his rut--building his resilience, increasing his leg strength, restoring his will to win.

“Football helped Q a lot,” says Travis Hannah, Quincy’s roommate, a fellow USC wide receiver/sprinter. “Q was down on himself at the time--football showed him how tough he could be.”

In the spring of 1991, Watts made another decision: to devote himself full time to the 400. Before the season, his personal best in the event was a 46.67 he recorded in high school. He had taken up the event in college only to ease the pressure on his legs. “The 400 was completely foreign to me,” Watts says. “I didn’t like it. I didn’t like training for it. I didn’t accept it. I began to dread coming to practice.

“But I was putting up some pretty good times, and I knew I could do even better. I started to realize that the 400 could get me to the Olympics. So I accepted the event, like my dad’s proverb: Being the best means doing the things you hate to do when you need to do them. Once I did that, I stopped hating the 400.”

In a little more than a year, Watts has sliced nearly three seconds off his best 400 time. At last month’s Olympic trials in New Orleans, he ran a 43.97 semifinal, the fastest 400 in the world since the 1988 Olympics. The next day, he posted a 44.22 to finish third in the final behind Danny Everett (43.81) and Steve Lewis (44.08), clinching a spot in the individual 400 and the 4 x 400 relay. Everett and Lewis should be Watts’ toughest competition in Barcelona.

With the media focusing on Butch Reynolds’ Supreme Court-sanctioned bid to compete in the trials, few noticed Watts’ exploits. But Smith did. “They postponed that semifinal three times because of Butch, and that really threw Quincy’s rhythm off,” Smith says. “So he goes out and runs a 43.97.

“Then the next day, he ran a 44.2, flatter than a tire. That impressed me even more. He had to work for that 44.2. That showed me what he’s capable of doing in Barcelona.”

Rufus is beside himself with excitement. He’s thinking about the countless hours he spent holding stopwatches for Quincy, meeting with Quincy’s teachers, watching Quincy’s practices, motivating Quincy to work harder. He gleefully repeats his Hallmark message: It’s cloudy now, but if you work hard, the sun will shine again.

“The sun is shining now,” Rufus says. “It sure is shining now.”

In fact, the sun is shining now. It’s beating down on UCLA’s Drake Stadium, and most of the Olympians who have come to Westwood to train are taking a break from the heat.

Heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee is debating the merits of various sports drinks with her husband/coach, Bob Kersee. Sprinter/hurdler Gail Devers is discussing her “I Love Lucy” fetish with a friend. (“I got Lucy key chains, Lucy boxer shorts, Lucy posters . . . “) Hurdler Kevin Young is giving an interview.

But Watts is out on the track, learning how to negotiate the first turn in a 400.

“You’ve got to tilt your shoulders to square into the turn,” Smith tells him, showing him how. “You’re like aaarghhh, and that’s why you’re struggling. You get to that mark, you got to go daaahhh !” The aaarghhh is tense, constricted, anguished. The daaahhh is unrestrained, exuberant.”

Watts nods his head. He gets it now. “I’ve got a lot to learn,” he says with a grin. “Better learn it quick, huh?”

For the first time in years, Watts is having fun at practice. He’s upbeat, he’s loose, he’s dishing out abuse. He teases USC hurdler Mark Crear about his vocabulary. He teases Hannah about his haircut. When a newspaper photographer comes by looking for competitors from the Transplant Games, Watts solemnly raises his hand.

At the pull-up bar, Watts razzes everybody, even Smith: “Rumor has it you’re only good for one more, Big John.” Big John falls off the bar, giggling like a teen-ager.

But when his turn on the bar comes, Watts gets serious, intense. “All right, Q,” he says softly. “Knock these out like the wind.”

He does.

“Q’s mellow, man,” Hannah says. “But when it’s time to get busy, he gets busy.”

Hannah should know. He was a track star at Hawthorne High while Hawthorne and Taft were taking turns winning state championships. He and Watts were archrivals, and archenemies. When USC assigned them to the same freshman room, they both tried unsuccessfully to get reassigned. During their first few months living together, they barely exchanged a word.

But once they got to know each other’s off-track personalities, they became best friends.

“There’s soft-hearted, regular old Quincy Watts,” Watts says of himself. “He’s just a normal guy who likes to hang with his friends. He doesn’t sweat and bleed track. When he’s competing, though, that’s when he becomes the Q. Then, he’s taking care of business.”

Practice is over now. Watts has run seven consecutive sub-11 100-meter dashes, and he’s breathing hard. But Smith is still holding court, teaching Watts yet another lesson. This one deals with the frequently overlooked subject of athletic toenail maintenance:

“You’ve gotta cut your nails, Q. You gotta manicure them before you leave for Spain. You don’t cut your nails, they’ll go SHTSHTSHTSHTSHT and you’ll have a shoe full of blood.”

Smith emphasizes his point by karate-chopping his hands up and down. He looks like Edward Scissorhands giving a haircut. “Every day, I learn something new out here,” Watts says, laughing. He pauses, and sucks some air. “Seven hundreds in a row--now that’s a learning experience, man.”

When the Olympics are over, Watts will go back to school to finish his communications degree. He had a 3.2 grade-point average last semester; he would like to do better next fall. Someday, he would like to be a sideline reporter at television sports events.

Rufus insisted that his son get an education along the road to Barcelona. He got his wish.

Quincy Watts has learned patience, dedication and commitment. He has learned that nothing comes easy, that adversity provides growth, that family provides strength, that a bitter enemy can become a best friend. He has learned that a sense of humor is the best antidote to fatigue, that you have to go through a lot of aaarghhh before you can get to daaahhh.

Most of all, he has learned that he’s still learning. The education of Quincy Watts began long before the Olympics, and it will continue long after the Games are over.

“It’s an amazing story, if you think about it,” Rufus says. “Quincy’s been through so much, and he just overcame everything. It was destined to happen this way.”