How Fast Is The Fastest Man Alive?

Other poignant bulletins followed. Correspondent Hill was remarkably well informed. Finally Hayes stood up. "Coach, can you get my name back in there?" Hayes asked. Hill said he thought he could. Hayes ran and won.

Generally, Bob Hayes is a noncomplaining, self-sacrificing athlete who, except for a few cramps and one bad bruise from a fall in Madison Square Garden, has never been noticeably injured. He is heavily muscled—only his ankles are skinny—with formidable thighs and calves, prominent high buttocks and powerful chest and shoulder development. When he runs there is an exaggerated rotation of the shoulders and, wide-legged and pigeon-toed, he powers along. While Hill would like Hayes to take off six pounds before Tokyo, weight is no problem. Hayes came off the football field in January weighing 196 and ran 100 yards in 9.1.

Hill has a surprise this weekend as part of his projected pre-Olympic schedule. He is taking Hayes with a relay team to the Coliseum Relays, but he has not entered him in the 100-yard dash. Hayes will run only the 200 meters. "I want him fresh and ready for Carr. If possible, I want him to annihilate some people out there. Put a few scars on their memories, so they'll be thinking how nobody breaks that tape before Bob Hayes."

Robert Lee Hayes is called "Crow" by his friends—"only by my friends," he says, but he likes the nickname. Why Crow? "Because he looks like a crow," says a qualified friend. "Sort of pointy-faced and shiny. And it's a natural, man, because he flies, he flies. He's the shortest distance between two points."

Hayes works hard at being one of the fellows. He is proud of the T that the guys burned on his right forearm with a hot wire one night, because it makes him one of the Tramps, a fraternal group at Florida A&M. He is unnerved by too much attention, which he invariably gets, and as a way of showing his unturned head he will go around with his shirttail out. "He'd wear overalls on the plane if he thought he was being a regular guy," says the friend.

But there is also some Tabasco in Hayes. He was slick on a Friday night in Atlanta in gray-striped suit and close-brimmed, broad-straw hat that he dipped rakishly over his right eye. On the field he wears red-white-and-blue Olympic spikes, and he eschews the regular A&M sweat suit in favor of any one of a colorful selection of eight. He wore blue on Friday, then on Saturday a maroon he got from a German he defeated on a European tour last year. At school he is noted for his talks in government class on the wretched raw fish a certain visiting athlete had to eat in Russia. "Never again. Never again," he says.

Hayes does not practice false modesty. He does not practice any modesty, really, but his boasts are not unattractive, and more often than not he speaks of what he knows. As a sophomore in high school he told his coach he could outrun any of those clowns on the track team. The coach said, "Let's see you do it," and Hayes did. "I could always run fast," he says in the way of explanation.

The one time he high-jumped he did six feet, he says, and he broad-jumped 20 feet nine inches, but "I wasn't really interested too much." There are those, too, who will vouch that he plays a good game of basketball, and since he was a center fielder on his high school team it would not be hard to find somebody who thought him another Willie Mays.

He is also known as a boy devoted to his mother, "a wonderful kid with a heart of gold," says Coach Gaither, but there was a time last year when resentment from his teammates became so apparent that Gaither had to tell the wonderful kid to please go someplace while he talked with the green-eyed boys.

"You oughta be ashamed," said Gaither to the boys. "But, more than that, you ought to be proud you're on the same team with this fellow. Do you realize he's the fastest that ever lived? All right, you're a little jealous of the attention. I can understand that. So I'll guarantee you something. I guarantee any one of you, you race him and, sure enough, if you beat him you'll get the very same attention he's getting."