Unglued Shoe Is Causing a Real Flap : Track and field: Nike calls incident involving Watts embarrassing. Watts says he isn’t going to harp on it, and rival companies want to run with it.

When Quincy Watts’ coach, John Smith, sat down to breakfast Wednesday morning, he talked about the nightmare he’d had the night before.

“I dreamed Quincy’s shoe fell apart,” said Smith on a day off for track and field’s World Championships. “Tell me that didn’t happen.”

Sorry, John.

About 200 meters into the final of Tuesday night’s 400-meter event, a race in which Watts figured to at least win a medal and at best duplicate his performance in the Barcelona Olympics last summer by winning the gold medal, he sensed something afoot.

Literally.

With the sole of his left shoe coming unglued, flapping on the track at Gottlieb Daimler Stadium like a flat tire, his plan for the race similarly flopped. The former USC sprinter from Calabasas limped to the finish line in fourth place with a time of 45.05 seconds, almost a second and a half behind the winner, Michael Johnson, whose time of 43.65 was the third-fastest ever.

“It was a one-in-a-million thing,” Watts’ Century City agent, Lon Rosen, said Wednesday of his client’s misfortune.

Smith, who has been either running or coaching at the world-class level for a quarter of a century, said he never had seen such a thing.

Neither had Tom Hartge, Nike’s marketing manager for running.

“In all of our history, with all of the athletes we’ve had, I don’t ever remember this happening,” he said.

Watts, understandably, was too stunned to offer much perspective on the incident Tuesday night. But, by all accounts, he did not spend as fitful a night as Hartge, whose company handmade the shoe for Watts at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore.

“I didn’t sleep much,” said Hartge, who was not consoled by the fact that the first two finishers, Johnson and Butch Reynolds, also had worn customized Nikes. “It really drove me crazy. Our shoe was not up to the level of Quincy Watts as a performer. For me, it’s embarrassing.”

The fourth World Championships all too apparently are part of an aggressive marketing campaign for several companies, representing everything from chocolate bars to luxury cars. But there is no business like shoe business.

“It’s like the Indy 500, where every advertisement you see is about tires,” Smith said. “Here, it’s shoes.”

In the not-so-distant past, reporters searching for interviews contacted the athletes’ national delegations. Now, reporters contact the athletes’ shoe companies. The major shoe and athletic apparel companies each have hospitality rooms, where they invite the press to come each day and talk to athletes who wear their brands.

The companies assume, of course, that most of the publicity generated will be positive.

But then they also assume that their shoes will not fall apart.

Nike’s bad news, however, was good news for its rivals. As Watts left the track after the race, a representative of another company, surrounded by reporters and photographers, was yelling, “Hey Quincy, show us your shoes.”

Hartge said he preferred to believe that was not indicative of the other companies.

“We’re very competitive, but I’d like to think we play at a fairly high level,” he said.

Maybe. Maybe not.

John Morgan, Reebok’s vice president of product marketing, said he had a meeting scheduled Wednesday with the chief executive officer, Paul Fireman, and one of the topics would be whether the company should attempt to use the mishap to its advantage.

“We’re pretty open about these things,” Morgan said by telephone from Reebok’s Massachusetts’ headquarters. “To me, we’re in the entertainment business.

“I’d hate to do something to reflect badly upon the athlete. But it would be nice to have some fun with Nike.”

Morgan admitted, however, that such a strategy could be risky.

“Our shoes, like theirs, are made by hand, and there is the possibility of human error,” he said. “We live in a glass house.”

Nike’s promotional efforts in Europe this year focused on three athletes, one of whom, ironically, was Watts. His picture from Barcelona is in the window of hundreds of sporting goods stores across the Continent.

But he has not run as well this summer as he did in 1992, suffering, Smith said, from post-Olympic letdown. It was not until they arrived here last week that Smith felt Watts had regained his form. Then, the runner fell in the shower last Friday and had to be taken to the hospital for observation. Doctors said he had a bruised spine.

It was not until the semifinal Monday night that he ran without pain. He showed in that race that he finally was ready to challenge Johnson, beating Reynolds with an unlabored 44.63.

“Quincy was really ready to run yesterday,” his father, Rufus Watts, said Wednesday. “I don’t want to take anything away from Michael because he ran a spectacular race, but I know Quincy would have finished better than fourth.”

He said his son “handled it like a man. He handled it better than I did. He told me to be cool.”

Which is what Quincy was Wednesday afternoon.

“I’m not going to harp on it and hold Nike responsible and sulk,” he said. “It’s just something that happened. It’s unfortunate it happened in the World Championships. But it has been an unfortunate year all around.”

Watts, who customarily uses a pair of shoes for two races and was running his second race in the pair in question, said the episode would not affect his relationship with Nike.

Meantime, Hartge said he did not know what caused the glue adhering the sole to the shoe to give way. But he plans to take the shoe back to Beaverton with him for the company’s laboratory analysts to study.

“It’s a mystery,” he said.

Perhaps it can be explained by the Sports Illustrated cover jinx. Watts was not on the cover lately, but Nike’s chief executive officer, Phil Knight, was.