Double Talk

As he jogged onto the track to warm up before a race at last summer’s World Championships in Goteborg, Sweden, a small group of fans started to chant, “Magic, Magic, Magic.”

Michael Johnson stopped and searched the crowd, looking for . . . well, somebody else. It was several moments before he realized they were chanting for him.

Johnson knows he isn’t simply another sprinter, but he has never considered himself a superstar. That comes from growing up in Dallas, where there are only two kinds of professional athletes: Cowboys and others.

Neither has Johnson felt there was anything magical about his running. If anything, he appears to be working harder than his competitors. Runners such as Edwin Moses and Marie-Jose Perec take such long, elegant strides that they are compared to gazelles. Johnson’s are short and choppy. He takes so many steps that his feet seem to barely lift off the ground.

Yet, even though he seems to run in place for so long, he almost invariably has a commanding lead when coming off the curve to enter the stretch in the events he has virtually owned during the ‘90s--the 200 and 400 meters. Only then does it occur to most that they might be seeing something extraordinary. They turn to each other with eyes opened wide and mouths gaping, as if to say, “How did he get there?”

Anyone who lost touch with Johnson after high school and now sees him on magazine covers, and with his own USA Today column and World Wide Web site in seven languages and appearances on “Today” and “Tonight” and everything in between, must ask the same question.

His truck driver father, Paul, delights in showing visitors pictures of Michael as a roly-poly, chinless 10-year-old. Embarrassed, Johnson insists that he was the fastest kid on his block in the middle-class Oak Cliff section of Dallas.

In truth, he competed for a year on the track team at Skyline High before the coach knew who he was. He was not the fastest runner in the city until he was a senior, or even the most athletic Johnson in his school.

That was Larry, the basketball player who later would star at Nevada Las Vegas and in the NBA. Michael was recruited to Baylor University in Waco, because the coach needed to fill out the sprint relay team.

“I’d like to be able to tell you that I knew Michael would be my once-in-a-lifetime sprinter,” says Clyde Hart, who 10 years later still coaches Johnson. “But I’d be lying. I never thought he’d be world class.”

Johnson, 28, is almost out-of-this-world class. He is easily the best to double in the 200 and 400 since Tommie Smith, the only man to hold world records in both events. Johnson broke the 17-year-old world record in the 200 by running 19.66 seconds last month during the U.S. Olympic trials in Atlanta.

Few expect Butch Reynolds’ 400-meter record of 43.29, set in 1988, to survive Johnson’s assault when he returns to the same fast track for the Olympics. He has five of the eight fastest times ever in that event, with a best of 43.39.

He is so dominant that it will be an upset if he doesn’t become the first man to win the 200 and 400 in the Olympics.

Betting on him would be a gamble only in the 200. Earlier this month, his 21-race winning streak at that distance was broken in Oslo by Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks. Johnson, who had not lost a 200 since July 1994, shrugged it off, considering it an aberration.

Johnson has won 54 consecutive 400 finals, dating to the indoor national championships in 1989. He has never lost an outdoor final.

So superior is he in the 400 that organizers of a Grand Prix meet in London last Friday withdrew his invitation because they feared that he would so badly thrash the British quarter-milers that they could not recover in time for the Olympics.

Even Johnson’s No. 1 rival, Reynolds, concedes, “He might be unbeatable.”

As far as track and field officials are concerned, he had better be. Not only do they want him to achieve the historic double, they want him to achieve it in a fashion that restores interest in a sport that attracts attention in the United States for only two weeks every four years.

That is not too much responsibility for Johnson. He asked for it, insisting on the changes in the Olympic schedule eventually granted by the International Amateur Athletic Federation that will allow him to give optimum efforts in the 200 and 400.

To make sure he receives the optimum exposure, the starting times for his events were changed again Wednesday to make sure he is on television when most sets are on. Deion Sanders is no longer the only Prime Time in Dallas.

*

Minutes before the quarter-milers were called for their final in the U.S. trials last month, Johnson sat alone in a corner of the holding room with headphones on. A nervous young runner, Alvin Harrison, approached and tried to make conversation. Johnson responded with a glare so piercing it frightened Harrison.

After winning, Johnson sought out the third-place Harrison and hugged him. He then explained something that other quarter-milers have all learned.

Before each race, the usually congenial Johnson replaces the rhythm and blues and jazz that he usually prefers in his portable cassette player with rap and begins to summon the aggression he needs to compete. He calls it “The Danger Zone.”

No one is allowed to visit.

He believes the ability to control his environment, even more so than his speed, separates him from his competitors. Everyone on the track is fast. Not everyone refuses to proceed with any aspect of his life unless every detail is planned.

He sometimes seems merely quirky, such as one day last summer in Sweden when he awoke at 7 a.m. and began planning his attire for after the 200 final that was scheduled for 12 hours later. He laid out potential ensembles on the bed three times during the day before he chose.

To assure that nothing was beyond his domain for the Olympic year, he broke up with his girlfriend and hired a former Baylor defensive end to guard not only his body, but his water bottle, and a publicist to screen his interview requests. He is accessible to the press, giving his undivided attention for an agreed-upon period of time. When that time is up, he is out the door.

As much as he wanted to chase history, Johnson was adamant that he would not enter the 200 and 400 in Atlanta unless he could do it on his terms. He balked at the IAAF’s first schedule adjustment because it required him to run the final of the 400 and the first round of the 200 on the same day.

IAAF President Primo Nebiolo stubbornly resisted another change, arguing that Johnson could advance past the first round of the 200 “running backward.”

That might have been true, but Johnson was equally stubborn. He demanded that the first round of the 200 begin no sooner than 24 hours after the 400 final. IAAF officials relented. They even scheduled a day off in between.

“We believe that the Olympic Games will be more important if the United States will have its heroes,” said Nebiolo, acting as if it were his idea all along. “And Michael Johnson is one of those heroes.”

*

Paul and Ruby Johnson were not trying to raise heroes. All Paul wanted, he says, was to make sure none of his five children grew up to be truck drivers. He extracted two promises from each: that all go as far as they could in school and get jobs that paid enough for them to buy homes.

“The emphasis in my house was on school,” Johnson says. “My mom is a teacher. My brother and sisters all paid for their education at North Texas [University], so they weren’t involved in sports. They all say my parents slacked off when it came to me. That’s how I got into track.”

Michael, the youngest, won the first of his six world championship gold medals in 1991, in the 200 in Tokyo, but says that paled in comparison to the thrill his family received when he graduated from Baylor.

He dreamed in high school of becoming an architect. When he realized much sooner than anyone else that he would make a good living as a sprinter, he decided to major in business and marketing. Again, it was a control issue. He has a manager, Brad Hunt, to handle his meet appearances and endorsements. Johnson handles his own money.

There is much to handle. He earns at least $1 million a year, much of it from major sponsors such as Nike, Bausch & Lomb and Sara Lee. Hasbro sells a four-inch figurine of Johnson.

Since achieving a world record in the 200, the only thing in the sport he wants that he does not have is an individual Olympic gold medal. He won one in the 1,600-meter relay in 1992 in Barcelona, but, heavily favored to win the 200, he did not advance beyond the semifinals after his training was interrupted by food poisoning two weeks before the Games.

“I don’t need the Olympic Games to validate Michael Johnson,” he said later, betraying no disappointment. He does not reveal that he returned to his hotel after the race, found his father and cried in his arms. For a moment, he let go.

*

Johnson was late, very late. Invited to San Diego as the U.S. Olympic Committee’s sportsman of the year for 1995 on a Friday night last April, he chose to travel that afternoon because he wanted to get in a complete workout before leaving Dallas. His flight delayed by thunderstorms and a tornado watch, he arrived after the banquet began.

Rushing to the stage after a change of clothes to accept his award, he took a deep breath and told the audience: “I usually plan my speeches on the plane, and I was on the plane for six hours. So get comfortable.”

There were nervous laughs. No one knew for sure whether he was joking.

Johnson speaks in a monotone, seldom laughs aloud in public and is so earnest that is is difficult to picture him as the man who has replaced Carl Lewis as the sport’s persona.

Lewis certainly cannot picture it.

“The electricity is not there; there’s no buzz,” he told the International Herald Tribune during last summer’s World Championships. “The one American they are trying to build up is Michael Johnson, and he’s not doing anything for them.”

Although he reacted badly to Lewis’ remarks, Johnson knew that other people were saying the same thing.

Friends already had advised him to reveal more personality. Johnson was prepared to do anything to erase his image as a nerd. That was started by the track coach at Skyline High, Joel Ezar, who recalls for anyone who will listen that Johnson came to school every day in black eyeglasses and a necktie with a brown briefcase at his side.

“He looked more like an Oxford scholar than an athlete,” he says.

Johnson huffs: “I wish he’d stop it with that. It was the style in those days to look nice.”

Johnson now makes sure interviewers know about his love for fast cars. That when he was in London last year for a track meet, he took time out to enroll in a course for beginning Formula One drivers.

He also has tried to become more of a showman on the track, perhaps going too far in the 1995 national championships when he raised his arms in triumph several meters before the 400 finish line. That cost him a time that no doubt would have approached the world record. It also cost him his friendship with Reynolds, the runner-up.

“Let’s save the dancing for the dance floor,” Reynolds said later.

Instead of apologizing, Johnson learned that he enjoys the in-your-face give-and-take with competitors.

On the prospect of Reynolds challenging him in the 400 this summer, Johnson said recently: “Historically, his strength has been the last 100. Historically, I’m usually gone by that point.”

Propelling him is an unorthodox running style that incorporates his arms pumping up and down like a wooden soldier, an arched back and clipped strides because his legs are unusually short for his 6-foot-1 body. Several coaches tried to change him. Hart did not.

“A long time ago, as a young football coach, I was told to work with the punters,” Hart says. “We had a guy kicking the ball about 40 yards and I worked with him one day. Soon I had him down to 25 because I was teaching him proper form.”

As it turns out, Johnson’s form might be proper. Ralph Mann, a silver medalist as an intermediate hurdler in 1972 and an expert in biomechanics, has studied Johnson races frame by frame on high-speed film and declares that he runs more efficiently than other runners, generating more turnover.

“Maybe some people are spending too much time going up and down and not enough going forward,” Hart says.

Now even those who once criticized Johnson’s style remark that he runs a lot like Jesse Owens.

All comparisons to Owens are appreciated. Johnson would like to be remembered with him and Lewis as the greatest male track stars of the Modern Olympics’ first 100 years.

The next 17 days will go far toward determining that.

“There are a lot of people who want to see me do something that’s never been done before,” he says. “There’s also a lot of people who will want to see me be unsuccessful. Regardless, they want to watch.

“That definitely adds a tremendous amount of pressure. People are going to be saying, ‘The entire Olympic schedule was changed for you.’ Everyone is looking at me. But I think I perform well under pressure. I don’t want to hold back anything. I feel like I’ve been given a tremendous opportunity, and I don’t want to let it pass me by.”

Almost nothing--or no one--ever does.