Freddogg Off The Chain

He could have been an Olympian and gotten his picture on a Cornflakes box.


Another great track team back in the early 1980’s and we were on our way to 30 straight wins. We were midseason sitting at 6 and 0 when some of my sprinters came to me and said we had to get Kevin out for the team, that he was shot from a gun bullet fast but said he didn’t feel like running.

I talked to this young kid who had been less than successful academically and had a very unsual shape to his head with a boney ridge running down the top center making him look a bit like a rooster but amazingly he had escaped nicknaming and people just called him Kevin.

I tricked Kevin into running one 100-meter race by getting him out of class and offering a 10-dollar bill to the winner. My fastest sprinters were there, more intersted in 10 dollars than any recruiting trick to snare Kevin.

I waved the 10 dollars before five experienced sprinters who took to their blocks while Kevin stood straight up in lane three. I fired the gun and it was over. Kevin was out and gone so quickly and decisively that my good guys started to shut down at 60 meters. The race was untimed but Kevin was sub 11 and potentially State champion quality.

He was an instant legend and star around school, which was amazing for a kid who had experienced no success and had low self-esteem because of that rooster head thing going on.

I found Kevin the next day and was ready to give him a uniform. Ironically he said ”Not so fast. I ain’t running no track because I know what yaw are trying to do.”

“And what are we trying to do Kevin,” I asked him?

“You guys haven’t lost a meet in three years so you get me to come out so if you do lose you can blame it on me,”Kevin said, and there was no talking him out of that logic, so the other sprinters started saying ‘didn’t nobody need his Foghorn Leghorn Self anyways” and I felt bad but Kevin didn’t care because he had my 10 dollars for less than 11 seconds work and they could call call him Ronald Reagan he didn’t care.

Freddogg