Burrell Is All Race and Very Little Talk : Track & field: Quiet 100-meter world record-holder takes another step today at Mt. SAC in validating the fastest-man label.

Linford Christie talks more than any Brit since Winston Churchill.

Jon Drummond, who sings in a gospel choir, once ran a major international race with a comb in his hair, perhaps feeling that he should be well groomed in case there was a television camera at the finish line.

Dennis Mitchell calls himself “The Green Machine”--because that is the color of his tights--and performs a bizarre pre-race ritual apparently inspired by ninjas.

“It’s our nature as sprinters to be a little cocky, self-centered and to jaw-flap some,” Mitchell once told Track & Field News. “It’s all just part of the game.”

Then there is Leroy Burrell.

He craves attention as much as any other sprinter. The difference is that performance is more important to him than performing. His game is to run faster than everyone else.

And despite an abundance of quality sprinters, he often does.

When the usual collection of Olympians gathers at Walnut today for the invitational portion of the Mt. San Antonio College Relays, Burrell will be the only one among them running the event in which he holds the world record, the 100 meters.

He covered that distance last summer at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 9.85 seconds, breaking Carl Lewis’ three-year-old record of 9.86 and, consequently, becoming recognized as the world’s fastest man.

Burrell objects to that title, contending that he will not believe he has earned it until he accomplishes something truly special, such as winning a gold medal in the Olympics or World Championships.

“There are a lot of athletes who haven’t broken the world record but have won the World Championships or the Olympics and can call their careers complete,” he told the Associated Press as he approached his 28th birthday in February. “I can’t call my career complete.”

He boasts so little that his Santa Monica Track Club teammate and Houston training partner, Lewis, feels compelled to do it for him. Lewis is Lewis’ favorite sprinter, but Burrell is a close second.

“It doesn’t matter who else is running, Leroy is always the one I’m looking for,” Lewis said last summer. “He might not get as much attention as the others, but he’s the fastest. What else do you have to know?”

Burrell acknowledged this week that he might be better known if he turned up the volume. For instance, he said he believes that Track & Field News rated Mitchell, Christie and Drummond ahead of him in the world rankings last year because they have done precisely that.

“I don’t make as much noise as they do,” he said. “I read an article by a writer who said he liked the entertainment they were bringing to the sport. Entertainment to me is running fast. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”

The closest Burrell came to woofing was when he said he wanted “a piece of Christie,” the only elite sprinter he did not beat last year in winning seven of nine races.

More typical of Burrell was a scene during the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany, when he bristled because he believed his teammates were celebrating excessively after setting a world record in the 400-meter relay semifinals. He said they should save it for when they won the gold medal, which they did the next day.

“You can have the best touchdown dance in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t get into the end zone,” he said this week. “I don’t have a touchdown dance. I just try to get into the end zone.”

He learned a lesson in humility in 1991, when he set the record in the 100 for the first time by running a 9.90 during the national championships in New York. He lowered it to 9.88 two months later, only to finish second in the World Championships in Tokyo to Lewis’ 9.86.

“I had been on top for two years, enjoying all the accolades,” he said in the AP interview. “I just left there knowing I had run one of the fastest races of all time and I had lost. It was very tough to break 9.90 and lose.

“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it for a year. I was very emotional about it. I couldn’t talk to Coach T (Tom Tellez) because he’s not emotional. He would have just said, ‘You didn’t do this or that, and that’s why you lost.’

“Coach T and (manager Joe Douglas) thought I would work it out myself. I sat at home and tried to work it out, and I couldn’t.”

Not until after his disappointing fifth-place finish in the 1992 Olympics did Burrell discuss his feelings with Tellez.

“Still, I was in a fog for two years,” Burrell said.

So he refused to let himself get too high after breaking the record for a second time last summer. As a result, he did not get too low when a foot injury ended his season after only four more races, the last one a seventh-place finish in the Weltklasse in Zurich, Switzerland.

“The only thing that upset me a little was, because of the way the season ended, some people thought my world record was a fluke,” he said. “Other than that, the injury was a blessing in disguise. With the World Championships coming up this year, I needed to take some time off. I feel good now, in no worse shape than I did last year at this time. But, even more important, I got to be home for the birth of my son.”

Becoming a father, he said, has had a calming influence on him.

“I realize now that what I’m doing on the track is not the most important thing in the world,” he said.

Instead, he sits on the couch and marvels at how fast his 7-month-old son, Cameron Malik, gets from one point to another. He should be fast. His mother is Michelle Finn, who ranked third in the United States and eighth in the world in the 100 in 1993.

About Cameron, Burrell will boast.

“It might be because I’m his father,” he said, “but it sure seems to me that he is quicker than most other babies I’ve seen.”