SPORTS The Flash

In roughly the same amount of time it takes : to read this sentence aloud, Roy Martin, the freshman sprinter at SMU by way of Roosevelt High School in Oak Cliff, can | run one hundred meters.

That’s fast.

The precocious Martin narrowly missed I making the U.S, Olympic team in 1984, at the tender age of seventeen, but he’s a prime prospect to mine gold at the 1988 Olympics in Korea, thus making him (dare we say it?) a Seoul man. Even before the current track season began, Martin, who turned nineteen on Christmas Day, ranked second in the world in the 200 meters. Track and Field’ News, a bible for folks who sport stop- ’ watches around their necks and use the initials PR as shorthand for “personal record,” named Martin as America’s High School Athlete Of The Year for an unprecedented second consecutive year.

All Martin accomplished as a high school , senior in 1985 was to lead Roosevelt to a third consecutive state AAAAA team championship and anchor the Mustangs’ 400-meter relay team to a national high school record of 40.20. He clocked world-class times of 10.18 in the 100 meters, 20.13 in the 200 meters, and a 44.4 split on Roosevelt’s 1,600-meter relay team.

But will Roy Martin find the fame and fortune that comes from being the world’s fastest human? The incumbent WFH, Carl Lewis, is a millionaire thanks to track and field’s dash for cash. Bonus money at the prestigious international meets goes to the headliners, people like Lewis and Edwin Moses and Mary Decker Slaney and Eamonn Coghlan, and sporting on your vita the title of world’s fastest human creates leverage at the bargaining table. The phrase is one of the few that never fails to turn a sports fan’s head. Heavyweight champion. Heisman Trophy winner. MVP. World’s fastest human.

Some knowledgeable track observers think Roy Martin’s combination of talent and competitiveness gives him a legitimate chance to be the next WFH, if not this year ’ or the next, then certainly by the time the ’88 Olympics roll around.

“He’s one of the hardest working sprinters you’ll ever meet,” says SMU track coach Ted McLaughlin. “He does all the work and puts in all the practice you ask of him and does it with a great deal of enthusiasm. That in itself is uncharacteristic for sprinters, who have a reputation for being lazy and for trying to get by on their native ability.”

McLaughlin also places his prize recruit’s competitiveness, whether running track or just playing a friendly game of racquetball, on a par with anyone he’s ever coached, ; several Olympic medalists among them.

Other observers doubt Roy Martin will be ; able to add his name to a list of WFHs that includes native Texans like Bobby Morrow and Jim Hines and adopted Texans like Bob Hayes and Carl Lewis. The skeptics say Martin lacks the explosiveness out of the starting blocks to become the main man in the 100 meters. By the time he reaches his top speed, he’s spotted the Carl Lewises and Calvin Smiths too much ground to make up in so short a distance.

For that reason they believe Martin is better suited for the 200 meters, the event in which he placed fourth in the ’84 Olympic Trials as an unknown seventeen-year-old from Dallas. United States track officials viewed Martin as just another untested high school hotshot with suspect times-until the gun was raised and he ripped off a 20.2 to win one of the qualifying heats. Then, in the finals, Martin finally acted his age. As he took his place in the starting blocks, he was shaking visibly with fright. After coming out of the turn with a chance to make the U.S. team, he lost his form and stumbled home in fourth place. The top three finishers went on to Los Angeles.

Martin says his immediate goal is to become the “best ever” in the event. His closest followers think the goal is realistic. “I’ve said many times that 1 believe Roy Martin was put on this earth to win the 200 meters in the ’88 Olympics,” says Earnest James, the Roosevelt High track coach who became something of a second father to his protege, the product of a single-parent home. McLaughlin points out that Martin is already world-ranked in the 200 meters even though he hasn’t mastered the art of running the curve. The SMU coach believes that with a little seasoning on technique, the Mustang should do some cookin’.

Some Martin-watchers go so far as to suggest that he could also rule the 400 meters, where his combination of speed and strength brought Roosevelt’s mile relay team home in first place time and again. His one-lap splits compare favorably with those of the best quarter-milers around.

Martin demurs. “I don’t like the open quarter. I like it when it comes to the mile relay, but otherwise I’ll leave it to people like Kevin SMU teammate Kevin Robinzine, who’s approaching world-class status himself],” he says.

It may be Martin’s fete to be the right man for the wrong event. Great sprinters like Henry Carr and Tommie Smith, Olympic champions in the 200 meters, have tended to be overshadowed by 100-meter champions like Bob Hayes and Jim Hines. The way to guarantee stardom, as sprinters from Jesse Owens to Carl Lewis can attest, is to be the best in both sprints. That may ultimately become Roy Martin’s biggest challenge.



While debate continues over which events should be on Roy Martin’s racing agenda, no one denies that he is built for speed. At 6-foot-l and 175 pounds (when he’s fit, which hasn’t always been the case), Martin has the long, lean torso of a man who was born to run. And ever since the 1983 Eari Campbell Relays in Tyler, when Martin made up the improbable deficit of one hundred yards during the anchor leg of the mile relay, track people have known he had true grit.

Roy Martin grew up on Fernwood Street in Oak Cliff playing football in the streets and running races against the kids who lived on Harlandale and Strickland. He could hold his own. Both his parents, Roy Chester Martin Sr. and Ola Mae Dorrough Martin, were good athletes and so were their three sons, Reggie (a former basketball player at Houston Baptist University), Roy, and Rod (a budding star on the Roosevelt team). The Martins divorced when Roy was eight.

Roy’s father was a high school football sensation at Wilmer Hutchins High and later played at Bishop College. One of his father’s nephews, Harvey Martin, could also play a little ball. As in pro football, Dallas Cowboys-style. From his elementary school days on. Roy Martin dreamed about being the next football hero in the family. He still speaks wistfully about playing football for SMU, maybe after the ’88 Olympic Games.

Martin began running competitively in the