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Splendid sprinter Johnson belongs on short list of track's all-time greats
There was no surprise in Michael Johnson's announcement last week that he will retire after the Goodwill Games. M.J.'s plans seemed clear long before the Sydney Olympics, and nobody who has spent any time with the guy would have expected him to hang around getting progressively slower. Less clear is how he will be remembered. Sports history has left little room for track athletes. How many have reached the level of permanent household name? Not many. Jesse Owens. Carl Lewis. Florence Griffith Joyner. Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Those four for certain. Maybe Joan Benoit. Maybe Mary Slaney. Someday Marion Jones. Steve Prefontaine? I doubt it. Lots of great ones don't make the list. Jim Ryun, Marty Liquori, Tommie Smith, Bob Beamon, Al Oerter, Evelyn Ashford. Maurice Greene has a long way to go. Does Johnson belong on the short list? I think he does. From a performance standpoint, his career was staggering. No other male has won both the 200 and 400 meters at the same Olympics, as Johnson did, under intense, home-field scrutiny, in Atlanta. No male has repeated as Olympic champion in the 400, as Johnson did in Sydney. Nobody has run the 400 faster than Johnson's world record of 43.18 seconds at the 1999 world championships in Seville. His 200-meter world record of 19.32 seconds at the Atlanta Games might be the most transcendent performance in track history. (A year later, somebody asked Ato Boldon about running 19.32. ``My grandchildren might not run 19.32,'' said Boldon). Even more impressive was Johnson's consistency. With only occasional dips, he dominated two events for nearly a decade, putting together win streaks that were measured in years, not races. I once asked John Smith if Johnson was unequivocally the greatest two-four runner in history. ``No,'' said Smith. "Tommie Smith was because he did it on dirt." Fair enough, 1968 200-meter gold medalist Smith ran fast (19.83 at altitude and 44.5, hand-timed) on slower tracks and didn't get the chance to approach M.J.'s longevity because there was no money in the sport. And Tommie Smith was a majestic runner. But I'm not willing to concede that he would have run as fast, or as long, had he been born a generation later. That's too great a leap. Think about this: The 44-second, 400-meter barrier has been broken 38 times in track and field history; Johnson has 25 of those marks. Second-best is four. In the 200, Johnson has 25 sub-20-second runs, one more than Frankie Fredericks and many more than anybody else. U.S. quarter-miler Antonio Pettigrew put it best when he suggested that Johnson's greatness went so far beyond his peers that he hadn't even advanced his events. Nobody was close. If Johnson's rep suffers, it's for three events which occurred late in his career, all of them injury-related pull-ups or pull-outs. In June of '97, he pulled up in the ill-fated 150-meter World's Fastest Man race against Donovan Bailey in Toronto. In '99, he pulled out of a 200-meter race against Greene at the nationals in Eugene, Ore. And at the 2000 Olympic Trials, when he and Greene finally lined up in a deuce, Johnson pulled up coming out of the turn. Greene didn't finish the race, either. The effect of these three events, in certain corners of the track world (and maybe in the public at large), was to paint Johnson as a guy who will quit rather than lose. Only Johnson knows for sure. But his cred suffered more for failing to finish those three races than it would have had he lost them. Also, in August of 1997, he dragged a wounded leg around the track in Athens to win a world 400-meter title on guts and memory. In 2000, he insisted on trying to run the 200 all season long, even though his close friend and personal massage therapist, Dale Smith, told him it was a lousy idea and that his body would probably not hold up to the punishment. Bottom line: In track there are people who quit and people who do not. I don't know what happened to Johnson on those three days, but I don't think he's a quitter. Johnson has also come across as lacking a certain cuddliness that fans can embrace. Granted, he has one of the all-time starting-line stonefaces, but he can let loose, too. I met him for an interview last June at a Beverly Hills hotel, shortly after he had appeared on The Tonight Show. M.J. was typically cool at first. I asked him who had been the other guests on the show, besides him. ``Harrison Ford and Busta Rhymes,'' he said. I raised an eyebrow at this A-list company and Johnson just broke out laughing, as if he, too, was amazed that hard training and fast feet had brought him to such a place. The game face was just that, a game face. The most telling moment of all will be at the starting line of the next 400-meter major championship. Johnson's absence will leave a hole the size of his native Texas. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden covers track and field for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.
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