TRACK & FIELD / JOHN ORTEGA : No Sponsor? No Problem for Mayhew

Donna Mayhew of Nike Coast Athletics jokes about her dire financial straits now, but three weeks ago she was teetering on the edge of retirement.

A hip injury that has hampered her training for more than a year, a stack of unpaid bills and a lack of sponsorship to help defray the costs of training full-time had the former Glendale College standout considering the R word.

“She was basically ready to call it quits right then,” said Charlie DiMarco, Mayhew’s coach. “She was as down as I had ever seen her. If I had said, ‘You know what? You’re right. All these sacrifices you’ve been making for the past 15 years are no longer worth it, you should quit.’ I think she would have.”

Mayhew said her bark might have been worse than her bite, yet added that “things have got to change before next year. I’ve got to get some sponsorship. I can’t keep going like I am now.”

Mayhew won her fourth consecutive title--and fifth overall--in the women’s javelin in last week’s USA Track & Field championships in Sacramento with a throw of 194 feet 1 inch, yet she still lives the Spartan life of an amateur athlete. She drives a 1969 Camaro, lives with her grandmother in Glendale and receives some help with expenses from her parents.

The national title earned Mayhew a $4,000 stipend from USA Track & Field and Nike Coast pays for her entry fees and travel expenses to meets. But the six-figure shoe contracts and five-figure appearance fees that Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis and Noureddine Morceli command are only a dream to her.

Mayhew has never won an Olympic or World Championship gold medal, set a world record or been ranked No. 1 in the world like any of the aforementioned trio, but she’d like to be better off than the typical U.S. track athlete of the 1960s.

“You can’t be in it just for the money and I wouldn’t have done it for this long if I didn’t love it,” said Mayhew, who turned 35 on Tuesday. “And you only have a certain time in your life when you can be an elite athlete. . . . But it’d be nice to be a little more comfortable.”

Winning a medal in the World Championships in Goteborg, Sweden, in August or in next year’s Olympic Games in Atlanta could lead to the comfort zone Mayhew desires. Training consistently would make reaching those goals easier, but an injured right hip prevented her from competing this season until last week and she won’t throw again until the World Championships.

“We just figured that her time would be better spent training instead of competing in the next five weeks,” DiMarco said. “At this stage of her career, she’s got so much experience that she really doesn’t need to throw in that many meets.”

Mayhew agrees with DiMarco’s philosophy, but realizes that big marks in big meets are needed to attain the notoriety to improve her financial standing.

Otherwise, “If you see someone standing by the side of the road with a sign that says, ‘Will throw for food.’ It will probably be me.”

*

Mayhew was one of two former area standouts in Sacramento who won their fifth national outdoor titles.

Regina Jacobs of the Mizuno Track Club was the other. The 1981 graduate of the Argyll Academy (now Campbell Hall High) timed a world-leading 4 minutes 5.18 seconds in the women’s 1,500 meters.

Jacobs, the 1995 world indoor champion in the 1,500, ran behind the leaders for the first kilometer before surging into the lead with 450 meters remaining and powering away from her opponents in the last 200.

A strong kick could benefit Jacobs greatly in Goteborg; slow, tactical 1,500 finals have recently become the norm, rather than the exception, in the Olympic Games and World Championships.

*

A 40-minute delay to the start of the men’s 3,000 steeplechase at the USA Track & Field championships proved disastrous to Robert Nelson of Asics Track West.

The former Glendale College standout had run 8:41.59 to place fifth in his qualifying heat June 15, but finished a disappointing 11th in Saturday’s final with a time of 8:51.24. Several false starts in heats of the men’s 110 high hurdles delayed the start of the steeplechase.

“We just sat around and waited,” he said.

“And then when we started, I was running and watching the race instead of racing in it. . . . I just fell out of my head.”