TRACK AND FIELD / JOHN ORTEGA : As Injuries Rose, Mills’ High Jump Interest Fell

With the thrill of high-jumping diminishing, Crissy Mills figures it’s time to do something else with her life.

Mills, 23, was a two-time state champion at Campbell Hall High and appeared to have the potential to eventually contend for a spot on the United States Olympic team, but her recently completed collegiate career at USC was hampered by injuries.

A knee injury limited Mills to a handful of meets this season and left her feeling burned out about an event she once loved.

“I can’t see myself high-jumping for the next couple of years,” Mills said. “I’m just tired of it. It’s been a long time.

“Part of me [feels] like the last thing I want to do right now is [to] be out there high-jumping. But another part of me could see me getting back into it around the [year] 2000. You always see athletes come out of the woodwork during Olympic years, and I could be one of them.”

An age-group phenom since she began jumping in the fourth grade, Mills cleared 5 feet 8 1/2 inches as an eighth-grader in 1986. While competing at Campbell Hall, she improved her personal best to 5-9 as a freshman, 5-10 as a sophomore and 6-0 as a junior.

The 6-foot clearance gave Mills her second consecutive state title in 1989 and she was heavily favored to win an unprecedented third championship in a row in 1990, but a knee injury suffered while playing volleyball prevented her from competing.

Mills raised her personal best to 6-1 1/2 as a sophomore at USC to qualify for the 1992 U.S. Olympic trials and finished seventh in the 1993 NCAA championships, but she never regained the confidence and competitive zeal she had in high school.

Charlie DiMarco, her longtime coach, said Mills lost “the eye of the tiger” and she concurs.

“Before I ever got hurt, I never second-guessed myself,” said Mills, who lives with her parents in Toluca Lake. “I thought I was immortal. But when I came back after the injury, I didn’t have the attitude I had before. I had forgotten how to carry myself out on the track. I had forgotten about all the head games that go on in the high jump.”

After missing the 1994 season with a back injury, Mills hoped to conclude her collegiate career on a high note before beginning to train for the 1996 Olympic trials, but the latest knee injury broke her will to compete.

“I didn’t want to be out there jumping anymore,” she said about this season. “I still loved the camaraderie of being on a team, but I no longer wanted to train and compete.

“I had my few years when I was the one who could walk out on the track and people would ooh and ah,” she said. “But I have no regrets about my career.”

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Several disappointing finishes in the Olympic Games and World Championships will probably prevent Johnny Gray of Calabasas from ever being considered among the top 800-meter runners in history. Yet his runner-up time of 1 minute 43.36 seconds in Wednesday’s Weltklasse meet in Zurich, Switzerland, continued an unrivaled streak in the event.

This is the 12th consecutive season in which the 1978 graduate of Crenshaw High has run under 1:44.1 in the 800.

Gray, the U.S. record-holder at 1:42.60, has broken 1:44.0 in 10 of those years and dipped under 1:43 in four of them. Great Britain’s Sebastian Coe holds the world record at 1:41.73.

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Quincy Watts’ pride appeared to have gotten the best of him in a newspaper story that ran earlier this week.

Watts, the 1992 Olympic champion in the 400 and a three-time state sprint champion at Taft High, has been hampered by injuries and illness this year, but in the story he was quoted as saying: “With the Olympics coming up, I have a very good chance of becoming the first man ever to win back-to-back gold medals in the 400.”

When informed that that was a pretty bold statement considering American Michael Johnson won the 200 in 19.79 and the 400 in 43.39 in last week’s World Championships, Watts said, “Yeah, yeah. But it doesn’t matter. I didn’t see anything that scared me. I haven’t seen one runner out there that I feel I have to be concerned about.”

Watts had better be concerned about Johnson if he hopes to defeat him because Johnson has the kind of sprinter’s speed that other quarter-milers only dream about.

Johnson has personal bests of 10.09 in the 100 and 19.79 in the 200. In comparison, Watts has run 10.30 and 20.50 in those events.

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Gray and Watts are two world-class athletes that I had the pleasure of watching perform in high school, but no one impressed me more in his formative years than Algerian Noureddine Morceli.

I saw Morceli run a then-national junior college record of 13:41.30 in the 5,000 for Riverside College in the 1990 Northridge Invitational and the ease with which he ran convinced me that he was a future star.

In 1991, Morceli won the first of three consecutive world championship titles in the 1,500 and he holds world records in the mile, 1,500, 2,000 and 3,000.

He is expected to attempt to lower the world record in the two-mile (8:07.46) in today’s meet in Cologne, Germany, and said earlier this week that he’d like to become the first man to break the eight-minute barrier.