Land Of Sprinters And Dreamers

One of the many Jamaican kids deeply influenced by Wint, McKenley and Rhoden was Mel Spence. Now coach of the Jamaica College track team, Spence ran on the 4x400 relay team in the 1956, '60 and '64 Olympics and, with his twin brother Mal, made the Arizona State mile-relay team a national force. He worked for IBM in New York for seven years. "But good old home stayed Jamaica," he says. "I had to come home." Now he's an executive with the Jamaica Telephone Company.

Crisp and precise in speech and dress, Spence escorts a visitor to his school, which has a splendid academic reputation and a cattle guard at the gate. His team has begun its daily workout with a three-mile run through the streets, dodging coveys of uniformed, laughing elementary school girls. While Spence waits, he systematically identifies the factors that he believes combine to make Jamaican sprinters so good.

"You know about the competitiveness at the school level," he begins. "High school athletes are almost deified in Jamaica. That can give a false view of self, but it's sure tremendous encouragement. Then there's coaching, which is of a high level simply because of the great number of good sprinters we have had, who now work with kids."

Spence looks around at the fields of Jamaica College. At least there's grass on them. "We have some fine hurdlers here," he says, "but not a complete set of hurdles. The kids' diet is terrible. A lot of them only have a shaved ice and bun for lunch. Only during track season are they assured of a decent meal. That's when we beg companies to provide a piece of meat. Lots of kids come to school from the country and spend their first week in a dental chair. The point is, if they run so well under such conditions, they must be gifted with raw native talent."

The team gathers. "Our gym burned not long ago," says Spence, "so we use an old classroom." Without his direction, the athletes climb stairs to this room and clear desks and chairs from the dusty wood floor. Before a mural they begin a sequence of 14 stretching and strengthening exercises, the last being three 20-second bursts of high-knee running while pushing against the wall. Among the athletes a few words are softly exchanged, but all are intent on their tasks. "These guys never shirk work," says Spence.

When they're done, they go to rude steel parallel bars outside. They do dips and hand-walking on the bars. "When they practice starts, their shoulders won't be sore after five minutes," Spence says. They run over short steel hurdles for cadence. "Keeps people from overstriding. They learn rhythm." One boy has lost an arm. "He scraped it. Gangrene set in."

An assistant takes over the drills. Spence introduces a boy who had been kicking a soccer ball. "This is Nicholas Tracey," he says. "Fourteen years old, best 400 of 48.6. But Tracey is also an excellent soccer player, and soccer is in season, so he's enjoying the easier training." Tracey gives him a shy smile. To the visitor Spence says, "Don't say, in five years, I didn't warn you. He's tough."

A mustard-hued Mercedes glides down the drive. From it emerges the exuberant bulk of Dennis Johnson, the coach at the College of Arts, Science and Technology (a true college). Johnson ran for San Jose State from 1961 to '64 and burst to a wind-aided 9.2 for 100 yards at the Mt. San Antonio Relays in 1961. Spence gives Johnson the gist of the visitor's inquiry. "We had just begun talking about talent," Spence says.

"You probably can't find people anywhere as genetically mixed as here," says Johnson. "But I believe a lot of the original people must have come from a certain part of Africa, from a set of tribes rich in the physical ingredients of sprinting."

"But," the visitor says, "no part of Africa has ever had the sprinting success that Jamaica has."