Trojans’ Williams Needs Quick Lesson to Step Up in Class

Angela Williams, two-time NCAA women’s 100-meter champion, was sizing up her chances of exchanging those credentials this summer for some valuable Australian currency--a spot on the U.S. Olympic track team.

“If you’re in the top three at the [U.S.] trials, you go,” Williams said before delving into the particulars.

“OK. You can guarantee Marion Jones and Inger [Miller] are going to go.

“Then there’s Gail.”

That would be Gail Devers, two-time Olympic 100-meter champion and 1993 world 100-meter champion, who is 33 but ran 10.94 seconds last year--faster than Williams has ever covered 100 meters.

“Oh my God,” Williams said with a laugh. “It would just be a blessing making the final.”

Williams, who ran 11.12 seconds to win her second NCAA title last weekend, owns a personal best of 11.04, which is a USC school record for a woman. At next month’s U.S. Olympic trials in Sacramento, Williams will be stepping up in class, so she knows she will need to step it up on the track as well.

“My best chance,” she said, “is to take first in every [preliminary] round and then nip somebody for third in the final.”

More realistically, she realizes she’s running for a spot on the 400-meter relay team.

Four 100-meter sprinters are required for that assignment.

“Let’s say I’m kind of grooming myself as the favorite for the first leg,” Williams said, laughing again. “I’d like that position. I’d like that job.”

That in itself would be something for a still wide-eyed 20-year-old from Bellflower: grabbing the baton in the Olympic final, carrying it 100 meters and then handing it to the Big Three of 1990s U.S. female sprinting.

“It would be so bad,” Williams said, beaming at the thought. “If I get on that team and we get the world record, my name is going in the record book forever. That’s something they can never take away from me, know what I mean?”

TURNING THE THING AROUND

Williams knows the time and place for her to make an impact on the international scene is closer to 2004 than 2000. At 20, she is four years Jones’ junior, eight years younger than Miller, and was only a sophomore last season at USC.

“Marion Jones, she’s 24, she’s in her prime,” Williams said. “That’s given me hope. I still have years to go to get [more experienced]. I have more strength to gain. It’s like, man, how much faster can I go?”

Fast enough, she hopes and believes, to one day “be the leading lady.” “I’d like that,” she said. “Because I have some other things I’d like to do in track besides win and be the top sprinter.

“I want to change the whole sport of track. I want to change how people react to it.”

Williams won her second NCAA championship in front of a few thousand spectators and hundreds of rows of empty bleachers at Wallace Wade Stadium on the Duke University campus. It was a sorry sight, but it was merely another slice of the cold reality that faces U.S. track and field.

Even in an Olympic year, the sport in this country continues to founder at the turnstile.

Williams says she has ideas to trigger a recovery, ideas built around the revolutionary concept of track athletes interacting with potential fans.

“Say you’re in a grocery store and you bump into someone,” Williams said. “If you’re nice to that person and maybe spark up a conversation, you can change that person’s whole view of the sport. They’ll walk away saying, ‘You know, she was really nice, I want to watch one of her meets.’

“I’d like to see runners, when they’re done, go up in the stands and sit with the spectators and sign autographs. I’d like to see track come up with something like baseball cards, with stats on the back, so kids can collect them and pass them around. I’d like to see more athletes work with children at track clinics.”

Williams hopes someday to be in a power position, able to influence and enact some of these changes. But, she acknowledges, this is one event where no one will ever succeed going it alone.

In this event, the larger the relay team, the better.

“It’s going to take everybody,” she said.

MAURICE VS. MICHAEL (CONT’D, OF COURSE)

A bad piece of steak kept Maurice Greene out of the 100-meter sprint in Milan on Wednesday, but if you know Greene, you know that it takes more than a bout of food poisoning to keep a good mouth down.

Which is why Greene could be heard in Italy popping off about his impending 200-meter showdown--Round 1 at the U.S. trials, Round 2 in Sydney--with Michael Johnson.

Johnson, the 200-meter world record holder, hasn’t accorded Greene much of a chance when they do meet head to head. He blithely dismisses talk of a “rivalry” between the two, claiming Greene is a 100-meter specialist stepping too far out of class in the 200.

Greene, Johnson points out, won the 200-meter world championship in 1999 only because Johnson wasn’t entered in the event, preferring instead to concentrate on his successful assault on the 400-meter world record.

Greene, Johnson points out, has yet to break 19.8 seconds in the 200--which would still leave him nearly half a second behind Johnson’s world record of 19.32 seconds.

To this, Greene responds:

“All I would say is that if he is Superman, then I am Kryptonite.

“He’s just another athlete and I will only focus on me. I am not afraid of anyone. He’s a great athlete and deserves respect, but I don’t go into any race being afraid of anyone in it.”

Greene describes himself as “a 100-meter man who also does pretty well in the 200.”

“But I won’t be taking one more seriously than the other,” he added. “Both events are important to me and I want to go out there and win both.”

Greene said he will run at a meet in Helsinki on Thursday before returning to the United States to resume training for the U.S. trials.

ONCE AGAIN, SHE HAS HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE

After managing only 20 feet

7 inches in her first long jump competition of 2000, Jones will try it again, on her home track, Saturday at the Pontiac Grand Prix Invitational in Raleigh, N.C.

The meet will be held on the North Carolina State campus, at Paul Derr Stadium, where Jones trains six days a week. It was on this track a year ago that Jones jumped 23 feet but hyperextended a knee in the process-- contributing to so-so subsequent results at the U.S. championships (second place) and the world championships (third).

Also entered in the women’s long jump are the two athletes considered Jones’ chief competition at the U.S. trials, Shana Williams and Dawn Burrell.

GOTTA GET AWAY

To escape the fan and media hysteria that follows him wherever he swims--or dares to venture outside his hotel--in his home country, Australia’s Ian Thorpe heads to enemy territory this week to train in relative peace and seclusion through the end of June.

Thorpe, his coach Doug Frost and Australian swim team rookies Kirsten Thomson and Kasey Giteau will spend the next three weeks training in Colorado Springs-- partly for the altitude, partly for the distance from Sydney.

An attempted getaway last week to the Australian coastal town of Caloundra was a failure, requiring rope barriers to be erected at poolside to keep the crush of media and fans away from Thorpe.

“One of the reasons for coming here [to Caloundra] is to keep you guys away from [Thorpe and his teammates],” Australia national swim Coach Don Talbot told reporters. “That’s what the barrier is for.

“Even if we can get them out for two or three weeks, it gives them that little bit of a rest [from] that sort of stress, and we’ll be much harder to access as times goes by.

“We’ll meet our obligations. I believe we’ve got to talk to the media . . . but what we want is to control that.”