Earl Young: Once a relay man, always a relay man

When you’ve won as many races and been in as many airports, train stations, and bus depots as Earl Young has over the last half-century as, first, a world record setting runner and then an international businessman, you grow accustomed to people calling your name.
 
But of the countless occasions in which Young has heard his name through the years, none was more life-changing than the time he was called out of class as a 17-year-old southern California high school senior.
 
For many of us (and by many, I mean me), a trip to the principal’s office would’ve likely meant something wooden and definitely something painful. But there wasn’t a punishment waiting for Earl Young that day, just a possibility and the opportunity of a lifetime.
 
Abilene Christian College track and field coach Oliver Jackson, responding perhaps out of courtesy as much as curiosity to a recommendation letter from Young’s grandmother, had stopped by en route to a meet in Los Angeles. Jackson brought with him one of his scholarships and one of his athletes. Any coach could’ve offered the former; only Jackson could boast the latter: the world’s fastest man, a three-time gold medalist from the Olympics two years prior, and one of America’s most recognizable athletes – Young’s idol, Bobby Morrow. The deal was sealed before a word had been spoken. Earl Young would be a Wildcat.
 
In just two seasons at Abilene Christian, Earl dropped three seconds off his best quarter-mile time and gained at least that many inches in height. Coach Jackson liked to say Earl was “split high,” the way he described all of his long-legged runners.
 
But when he settled into the starting blocks at the 1960 U.S. Olympic trials in Palo Alto, California, as a 19-year-old ACC sophomore, he was still considered by many a long shot to qualify for the American team. Forty-six-and-a-half seconds later, he’d punched his ticket to Rome, finishing second only to Jack Yerman. It wouldn’t be the last time that summer Young would follow his fellow Californian.
 
After finishing 6th in the 400 meter dash with a time that had been the Olympic record going into the Games, Young set his sights on helping the U.S. win gold in the 4x400 relay. Yerman led off and gave his foursome an early lead. Young took the baton and headed toward the first turn. As his German opponent, Manfred Kinder, began to close on him, Young heard a familiar sound piercing through the noise at Olympic Stadium. It was Coach Jackson, whistling through his lips an admonition not to lay back or “loaf the curve,” as Young sometimes did. Young got the message, kicked into gear, and ran his leg in 45.6, giving teammate Glenn Davis the baton and the lead. The rest is history: Otis Davis finished off a world record time of 3:02.2. At 19, Young was the Olympics’ youngest ever track and field gold medalist.
 
Over the course of his career as a runner at Abilene Christian and beyond, Young would go on to set three more world records; lead his Abilene Christian teams to numerous titles at the prestigious Texas, Kansas, and Drake relays; make the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1961; and win two gold medals at the 1963 Pan Am Games.
 
Young would put his Olympic medal to the test in building a successful career in international business. His personal mettle would be tested a half century after his victory in Rome. In September 2011, Young was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. The bleak prognosis demanded an immediate bone marrow transplant, which came the following January thanks to a donor in Germany who didn’t know of Young’s Olympic exploits and, in fact, didn’t know him at all.
 
The transplant took. In the three years since, Young has lapped leukemia, discovered his donor’s identity, and is now planning to meet this woman whose marrow gave him so many more tomorrows.
 
And as he did all those years ago on the track, Young has taken the baton and worked tirelessly to encourage everyone to register as a bone marrow donor through the non-profit organization Delete Blood Cancer. Plans are underway for a huge donor drive on the ACU campus in March. Once a relay man, always a relay man.
 
Nearly 60 years after being summoned to his high school principal’s office, Earl Young’s name was called again on Friday, Jan. 9. He was at the head of the sixth class inducted into the Texas Track and Field Coaches Association Hall of Fame at a ceremony in north Dallas. He opened his acceptance remarks with a line only someone with his resume could get away with. Looking toward former University of Texas competitor and fellow Olympian, Dean Smith, who was also being enshrined Friday night, Young joked, “Dean, did you know your university’s original color was just orange? Then the ACC Wildcats started outrunning the Longhorns, and it became burnt.”
 
The crowd roared, a few of them perhaps louder than the rest. There to cheer Young on were former Wildcat greats James Segrest (who, along with coach Don Hood and Billy Olson, are the other ACU representatives in the Hall to date) and Dennis Richardson; as well as the man who has written so much of ACU’s athletics history, longtime sports information director Garner Roberts.
 
There is no loafing this final curve of Young’s remarkable life. He’s crazy enough to believe that not only can he outrun leukemia but that a cure for everyone can be found, and soon. It’s almost as preposterous a thought as a California kid following his boyhood idol to Abilene Christian and on into Olympic immortality. Coach Jackson’s whistle still echoes.