THE LONG RUN

In the beginning, there was Fred Kelly.

At the end, there was the incomparable Jackie Joyner-Kersee, plus Evelyn Ashford, Florence Griffith Joyner and Dwight Stones.

In between, track and field has had a great run in Southern California during the 20th century, even though it has faded badly in the home stretch.

Any history of the sport in the Southland begins with one of the century’s best early-success track stories.

THE HURDLER

Fred Kelly, a hurdler from Orange High, enrolled at USC in January 1912. Seven months later, at the Stockholm Olympics, Kelly became USC’s first Olympic track and field champion. Near century’s end, there were 33 more Trojan gold medalists.

Kelly’s coach, Dean Cromwell, was asked 30 years later--after he’d coached 12 NCAA championship teams--who was his best track performer.

“That would be Fred Kelly,” he told Times reporter Bob Oates without hesitation.

“I’m speaking from the competitive standpoint. There never was a better competitor than Kelly.”

Kelly went to Sweden with a cast of far more famous athletes. It was the team of Jim Thorpe, Duke Kahanamoku, Avery Brundage and Lt. George S. Patton Jr.

And Kelly was not the favorite in his specialty, the 110-meter high hurdles. The favorite, American John Nicholson, fell at the eighth hurdle and Kelly won the race.

A pioneering commercial aviation pilot in later years, Kelly died at 82 in 1974. He’s buried at Forest Lawn Glendale.

A SHORT LIFE

He was a Pima Indian, a student at Riverside’s Sherman Institute.

In the early teens, almost everyone in Los Angeles agreed, Albert Ray would be running the marathon at the 1916 Olympics in Berlin.

Ray, it seemed, could run all day. In the span of three months in 1913, Ray and his Sherman teammates dominated two prestigious road races, the Los Angeles Athletic Club Marathon and the L.A. Times Marathon. Actually, they were 10-mile road races through the streets of Los Angeles.

In winning The Times race, Ray got an eight-column headline the next morning, with The Times writer reporting that Ray “proved beyond doubt that he is the greatest long-distance runner in the history of athletes.”

Sherman runners finished first through seventh, with Ray breasting the tape in front of The Times building before anyone else was in sight.

There were no 1916 Olympics, of course. And Albert Ray was killed in action in France in World War I.

WORLD’S FASTEST HUMAN

The next link in the chain of Southland track kingpins was Charley Paddock, the first sprinter to carry the title of “world’s fastest human.”

Paddock, a world-class sprinter as a Pasadena teen, competed in the 1921 USC-Cal dual meet at Berkeley and won the 100 in 9.6 and 220 in 20.8. A San Francisco newspaper reporter wrote of Paddock: “He had earned for himself the title of ‘The Fastest Human.”’

Paddock, 5 feet 7 and 170 pounds, was famous for his “flying finishes,” 12- and 14-foot leaps at the finish line.

He competed in three Olympic games, winning one individual gold meal, in the 100 at the 1920 Antwerp Games. He was the first man to reach 9.5 seconds in the 100-yard dash, and he did it at the Coliseum on May 15, 1926.

Marine Capt. Charley Paddock died at 42 in a 1943 military plane crash near Sitka, Alaska.

THE BATON PASSES

Paddock’s legacy of sprint success became a USC tradition when Frank Wykoff, a Trojan from Glendale High, burst on the scene when he made the 1928 Olympic team, defeating a fading Paddock in both the 100 and 200 meters at the trials.

He won three Olympic gold medals in three separate Olympics as a relay team member, but never an individual sprint championship. In 1930, he lowered the 100 world record to 9.4. As a Trojan he was a two-time national champion at 100 meters.

He was a school administrator for all of his working life, most of it in Los Angeles. He died at 70 in 1980.

THE HIGH JUMPER

Two Olympic Games, the first in Los Angeles in 1932 and the next in Berlin in 1936, put Los Angeles and its black athletes on the world stage.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, built in 1923 with the Olympics in mind and called Olympic Stadium until after the 1932 Games, became the stage the Southland needed to make Los Angeles the track and field capital of the world.

At the Los Angeles Olympics, black American athletes such as Eddie Tolan, Ralph Metcalf and Edward Gordon became the first blacks to excel on a world sports stage since the days of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.

And in 1936, nine of 10 black athletes on the U.S. team won 13 medals.

One of them was the 1936 Olympic high jump champion, Cornelius Johnson of Compton College. Johnson was a Los Angeles High junior when he placed fourth in the 1932 Olympic high jump at 6 feet 5 inches.

Johnson won the gold medal in Berlin, jumping 6-8.

In 1946, he died at 32 of pneumonia aboard a merchant marine ship in San Francisco, where he’d been the ship’s cook.

THE ZAMP

In the 1930s, Lou Zamperini of Torrance High was a national headliner. He’d taken the national high school mile record down to 4:21.2 and made the 1936 Olympic team.

He became one of the nation’s major track stars during a USC career, before entering World War II military service.

In the South Pacific, he endured first one of the great survival events in maritime history, and then endured daily beatings for nearly three years in a Japanese prison camp.

Zamperini’s plane crashed while on a rescue mission in the South Pacific in June 1943. His life raft drifted about 1,500 miles in 47 days and when he was captured by the Japanese, he weighed 70 pounds and couldn’t stand.

Not until his 1945 release did anyone know he’d survived it all.

At 82, he still runs his neighborhood hills in Hollywood.

STORY OF THE CENTURY

No track and field story of the 20th century tops this. In fact, it may be that no sports story tops the story of Bob Mathias in 1948.

On Nov. 17, 1947, Tulare High track coach Virgil Jackson suggested to his hurdles/sprint star, Mathias, that he begin thinking of working other track events, like the jumps, shotput and pole vault.

Two hundred thirty-two days later, in London, he won the Olympic Games decathlon gold medal.

Consider:

* Two months before the 1948 Olympics, Mathias had never attempted a pole vault and had never seen a javelin.

* Two months before the Games, he had not only never competed in a decathlon, he had never competed in six of the 10 events.

He soon won two decathlons, the second one at the Olympic team trials. His third was for the gold medal, at 17.

He won it again in 1952. He also became a Stanford football star and later a member of Congress.

PELL-MEL

They called Mel Patton “Pell- Mel.” And when the Los Angeles University High product ran history’s first 9.3-second 100-yard dash at Fresno on May 15, 1948, they were calling this latest Trojan speedster the “world’s fastest human.”

At the 1948 London Olympics, Patton won a gold medal in the 200 meters and was fifth in the 100.

Patton, 74, is retired and lives in northern San Diego County.

THE WHALES

After the Patton era and USC’s “world fastest human” claim had passed, the Trojans next suited up the two greatest shotputters of the era.

First came Santa Monica’s Parry O’Brien, who in 1954 became the first man to crack the 60-foot barrier. He won two Olympic championships, in 1952 and ‘56, and a silver medal in 1960. He was fourth at Tokyo in 1964, where the gold medalist was another Trojan, Dallas Long.

Long came to USC from Phoenix and eventually boosted the world record in the event to 67-10.

O’Brien became a banker after he retired. Long retired from competition after the Tokyo Olympics and became a dentist.

A STAGE DISAPPEARS

In the last quarter of the century, track and field has been dying a lingering death. It was a sport that lost its stage to its master, football.

The Coliseum track was first removed when the Dodgers moved west from Brooklyn. The Dodgers played at the Coliseum from 1958 through ‘61, while Dodger Stadium was under construction.

But that didn’t kill track and field here, not yet.

In fact, Coliseum track events bounced back big time. With the new track, the Coliseum Relays--a major event here from the post- World War II years through the last meet, in 1966--continued to draw upwards of 50,000 people.

The UCLA-USC dual meet was a Page 1 event, as were international meets such as the United States vs. the Soviet Union, the Olympic trials and, of course, the 1984 Olympics.

The Coliseum’s final meet was the 1990 UCLA-USC meet.

The track was removed for the last time in 1993, so the football field could be lowered to enhance seating for the old stadium’s two football tenants, USC and the Raiders.

What happened?

“It was a combination of a lot of things,” longtime Southland track promoter Al Franken said.

“At a time when a lot of new sports were coming on TV, there was no national marketing program for track and field. Sports got spread out all over the landscape, and a sport’s popularity was based on its time on TV, and track never did have much of a TV presence.

“It just kind of went into a downward spiral.”

UCLA and USC still have spirited dual meets on their campuses, but for old-line track nuts, it could never be the same without the Coliseum.

But the memories live on:

In 1956, as an added attraction to the UCLA-USC meet, the great Australian miler, John Landy, was scheduled to run a special mile race against an assortment of collegians. Landy was the world record holder, at 3:58.

But another Aussie, Jim Bailey of the University of Oregon, passed him on the final turn and beat Landy in 3:58.6, Landy running 3:58.7. It was the fastest mile ever run in the Western Hemisphere.

The great race overshadowed the UCLA-USC meet, in which Rafer Johnson won three events.

Johnson, of course, was four years away from an epic matchup with a UCLA teammate from Taiwan, C.K. Yang, in the Olympic decathlon in Rome. The two close friends battled each other for two days, and came to the final event, the 1,500 meters, with Johnson leading by only 24 points. Johnson ran a lifetime best of 4:49.7 to win the gold medal.

And those among the 7,750 who were there will never forget the 1964 Compton Invitational when, for the first time, the first eight finishers in the mile--led by Dyrol Burleson--all broke four minutes.

USC athletes--who won 26 NCAA championships--dominated the first seven decades of the century, but UCLA’s rose to world prominence in the later years.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee--who also played basketball at UCLA--broke the world heptathlon world record four times in a 26-month period between 1986 and 1988. She dominated the event for 10 years, winning Olympic gold twice. Often, in major meets, she competed in the heptathlon and long jump, often winning both.

UCLA sprinter Evelyn Ashford twice broke the world record in the 100 meters (10.79 and 10.76), and won the Olympic championship in 1984. She won relay golds in three Olympic Games.

UCLA’s Gail Devers, at Atlanta in 1996, became the first woman sprinter since Wyomia Tyus in 1968 to win the 100-meter Olympic title twice.

High jumper Dwight Stones, also from UCLA, broke the world record three times between 1973 and ’76. Another Bruin, John Smith, ran the 440 in 44.5 for a world mark in 1971.

All in all, for most of it, a grand century.