This Writer Feels There’s a Need to Write About Speed

I am asked to write about speed. Happily, I am not asked to write speedily. Not that I am incapable of speed; an editor once said, “Kindred, you type faster than you think.”

But I prefer to type as slowly as possible in hope that an idea will leap from the vast unknown and demand to be part of the next sentence. Which brings me to Muhammad Ali, who has leaped into my stuff with more words more quickly than anyone else before or after.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, the hand can’t hit what the eye can’t see,” the great one cried out. And rightly so, for the young Ali came to work with such speed that ordinary men moved as glaciers alongside lightning.

He moved with a dancer’s grace and swiftness all but unprecedented in his mean game and never seen in a man 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds. His hands were so quick that his trainer, Angelo Dundee, said, “Muhammad’s jab is a snake-lick, out and back before you see it.” When the young Ali leaned against the ropes, daring an opponent to hit him in the mouth, no one could do it because, by unteachable instinct and indefatigable training, he could move his head from harm’s way so quickly you’d think it had never been there at all.

Before going in with the glowering and glacial George Foreman, Ali said, “I’ll be so fast that he’ll think he’s surrounded.” Then, just in case the ink-stained wretches didn’t know exactly how fast that was, Ali explained, “I’m going to hit him before God gets the news.”

Now, that’s fast.

Almost as fast as Cool Papa Bell.

Some folks believe the Negro League legend, a Hall of Fame outfielder with wings on his heels, stole 175 bases in a 200-game season. In Satchel Paige’s favorite stretch of the truth, Cool Papa drives a ground ball up the middle and gets hit by it as he slides into second. There is a documented story from an exhibition game against the Indians: Paige bunts with Bell on first base; as catcher Roy Partee picks up the ball to throw to first, Cool Papa brushes past him to score.

“Cool Papa was so fast,” said Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson, “that he could get out of bed, turn out the lights across the room and be back in bed under the covers before the lights went out.”

The hyperbole exists because the essence of sports is speed. Damon Runyon wrote, “The race is not always to the swiftest -- but that’s the way to bet.” Even as Branch Rickey ended baseball’s all-white history by bringing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers, he said speed mattered before color: “I believe that racial extractions and color hues and forms of worship become secondary to what men can do. The American public is not as concerned with a first baseman’s pigmentation as it is with the power of his swing, the dexterity of his slide, the gracefulness of his fielding, and the speed of his legs.”

Speed is the simplest measure. Race you to the third tree from the corner. But it also comes in forms that go unrecognized. The extraordinary tennis careers of both Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe were built on foundations of speed, balance and agility afoot. Tiger Woods’ tee shots fly 300 yards because he moves the club head faster than anyone who ever lived, and he’s able to do that because he snaps his hips back to the ball faster than--than what? “Faster than a rubber band twisted tightly and let go,” says Greg Norman.

Some football running backs can’t explain their work. “My definition of a good runner,” O.J. Simpson said long before he had reason to hire Johnnie Cochran, “is that he’s insane -- he does wild things, stuff you never seen, and he does it spontaneously. Even he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.”

Ever see one of Omar Vizquel’s barehanded plays at shortstop? It’s not baseball. It’s magic. Somehow, the ball doesn’t stop in his hand. It changes direction. Once headed for left field, it picks up speed on its way to the first baseman.

You saw Mark McGwire hit. But you never saw the bat cross the plate. It moved so quickly as to be invisible. An electronic gadget clocked McGwire’s bat’s movement at 99 miles per hour. TV folks said that was the fastest swing ever measured. I doubt it. The 99 mph part, that is. Looked more like Mach 3.

All well and good. Move fast. Better yet, move fast and think fast. Jack London, the adventure writer, once wrote, “I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor than a sleepy, permanent planet.”

One day a sportswriter asked the old Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler what London meant by all that.

“Throw deep,” Stabler said.

Larry Bird’s theft of an Isiah Thomas inbounds pass in the last seconds of a conference championship game was a wonder not so much of action as of thought. How’d he know to be there? How’d he know, after the steal, to throw it to a man he couldn’t have seen cutting to the basket? By a life’s work, is how he knew.

He knew it as quickly as Muhammad Ali knew what to say about a proposed fight against 7-foot-2 Wilt Chamberlain.

Ali said, “Timmm-berrrr!”