As I write, some attorney tries to extort Nike – allegedly – for twenty million dollars plus and shoe company executives head to prison instead of March Madness. Found an article titled SPORTS SHOES OFFICIAL DOUBTS RIVAL’S TACTIC. Pacts With High School Athletes ‘Incomprehensible.” By Nick Bertram. The Oregonian. June 8, 1983. Apparently – I don’t remember this at all – I was that sports shoes official. And the story didn’t end there. – JDW
An official with Nike, Inc. of Beaverton, a world leader in the sports-shoe business, said Tuesday he doubts that his competitors are signing lucrative promotional contracts with high school athletes.
Jack Welch, the company director of corporate relations, said such signings would be unlikely, primarily for business reasons. He said he guess such contracts could only be commanded by athletes at the world-record level, or Olympic gold medal winners.
A New York Times News Service story… said high school 400-meter star Clinton Davis of Homestead, Pa., would not compete in college and said reports indicated Davis had signed a promotional contract with the Puma shoe company, which allegedly was paying him $50,000 to $60,000 a year to train for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Puma has denied the charges.
Athletic shoes have grown into billion-dollar businesses during the last two decades. As competition grew in this lucrative market, companies began contracting with athletes on a promotional basis. Who was wearing what shoe became the “in” thing to look for during a competitive sports event.
Professional athletes began to promote shoes and veteran amateur athletes did so in their own way. There were reports that one team in this years’s National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament changed shoes as it neared the Final Four. But high school athletes?
“The attrition rate of the greatest athletes at the high school level is extraordinarily high,” Welch said Tuesday. “It makes almost no business sense whatsoever for a shoe company to work with high school athletes until they’ve proven themselves at a higher level, until they’ve matured as athletes and as physical specimens. Which is why I’d be very curious about reports of the Puma shoe company paying from $50,000 to $60,000.
“Especially since the 400 is probably our strongest event,” Welch continued. “You’re talking about a whole bunch of grownups out there. The current issue of Track & Field News list 25 people capable of running 45.64 (seconds) or better. So Davis is one of 25 people who can perform at this level – 25 Americans.
“So, I’m suggesting from a business aspect, it would seem just beyond comprehension that any company would pay the numbers that were expressed in this article.”
Welch said Nike is very careful in its dealing with high school athletes.
“Nike has no history, or policy or philosophy of any formal relationships with high school athletes,” he said. “We have given a handful of extraordinary athletes, maybe one kid a year, shoes and bags… now I imagine shoes, bags and apparel.
“Someone like Mary Decker probably received shoes from all the companies when she was in high school,” he said of America’s top woman distance runner. “If you look at pictures, you see her in a variety of shoes. After all, she was the world’s record-holder in the half mile at the age of 14.
“In the past we did work with a lot of high school-age girls, age being the operative word, through their clubs because traditionally there were not strong girls programs in the high schools. So a lot of high school girls ran with clubs and then we would work with the clubs to buy equipment. Our girls’ program has been drastically cut back in relationship to increased school activities.”
If the reports were true that Nike’s competitors have started signing high school stars, would that force a change of opinion?
“You can’t avoid the superstar,” said Welch, “which is why we have dealt with maybe one male athlete a year.
“The athlete would have to be so mature, so extraordinarily gifted, so currently successful. If this was the greatest athlete in the world in his event and he was in high school, then you have a different question. But you also have the question of legality. To my knowledge, you simply can’t do it. You certainly don’t want to destroy an athlete’s career, especially when everyone is going to be watching.”
Asked when Nike starts working on a contractual basis with athletes, Welch said: “I believe it has to be after college.”
NCAA rules do not allow a shoe company to give its product directly to the athletes but it can make a donation of shoes to an athletic department, which may distribute them as it pleases.
Welch then said that even if Evans were out of college, he likely could not command the numbers the New York Times Wire Service story talked about.
“Not if he is one of 25,” the Nike Official said.
“Assuming, if you watch this sport at all, you see what’s rumored for road racers, a guy who’s going to be on television year-round. He might make that. You see, it’s one thing to run a fast time and another to win something.
“Those sums that are paid,” Welch said, “there’s a recognition factor, a victory factor, a performance factor. I mean, the world’s greatest athlete that no one cares about is considered one way, someone who may be a little past his prime but still generates incredible media activity wherever he goes, is treated another way.”
Welch then returned to the Davis case. “I don’t think it’s true and if it is true it is very unfortunate. The unfortunate thing about it is that he would lose collegiate and Olympic eligibility. Someone being rewarded for excellence and performance has never been offensive to me.
“What I keep coming back to is the business question. “Will Clinton sell $60,000 worth of Puma shoes? Although he’s already got P{uma some publicity.”
That’s the business question. What about the moral question of a business costing as amateur his eligibility?
“You would erase any credibility you have,” Welch said. “It was a coach and an athlete who started this company to make better shoes so that people could run faster. The original goal was not to sell a billion dollars and be number one in America and number one in the world, but to achieve optimum performance or come close to the ultimate performance. The (existing) shoes weren’t any good so we started making good ones.
“What would we do with high school kids? There’s a rule against it, so we don’t do it.
“People have been talking, for instance, about Pat Ewing’s T-shirt,” he said of the Georgetown University basketball star center who has a Nike “swoosh” on the T-shirt he wears under his uniform.
“He wore T-shirts beforehand and his coach said, “Why don’t you put a Nike logo on T-shirts?'” Welch said. “It seemed like a smart idea. So, we did. You have to go through the athletic director and you have to make it available to all athletes and we do that.
“But about the time somebody has 30 basketball games erased or an Olympic gold medal taken away from him because you pay some kid some money in high school, the repercussions will last forever. We’ll look bad, we’ll look stupid and it will look like we don’t care.
“Another side is the kind of people you want in your shoes are not the rule breakers, not the cheaters,” Welch said. “Athletics, by definition, are discipline, adherence to life rules, dietary rules and training rules. So, the only violations that are permitted philosophically are those violations that are condoned by everybody and paying high school kids is not condoned by anybody to my knowledge.”
Clinton Davis: the Loneliness of One Short-Distance Runner
CURT HOLBREICHThe Pittsburgh Press January 21, 1985
Clinton Davis takes that last stride across the finish line. It is Madison Square Garden, the 1983 Millrose Games, and a 17-year-old high school senior has just upset the world’s greatest quarter-milers in the most spectacular debut by a prep sprinter since Houston McTear.
A big, boyish grin breaks out just under his wisp of a mustache as the finish tape goes slack around his waist.
Today that tape would stretch a little tighter.
Davis is 20 pounds overweight, out of college and out of shape. His favorite pastime is sitting at home in front of the television, watching one football game after another.
He is 19, but his promising track career may be over. It may have ended in tears at the U.S. Olympic trials last June. There is no shortage of explanations why.
Some say he was pushed too fast and burned out. Others blame it on greed. Davis took all the money he could from shoe companies and meet promoters and spent it on an expensive foreign car. But most of the criticism concerns his decision to remain near Pittsburgh and train independently with Coach Elbert Kennedy of the New Image Track Club.
Emotions run deep.
“Clinton should get the hell out of here because they don’t know what they have,” said Steve Dunmire, his former track coach at Steel Valley High School. “He should go to school, get a national coach, somebody who has trained super guys.
“He ran faster times as a 10th grader than last year. He’s got to snap out of it soon. If the kid would really bear down and start serious training, in 1988 he would be the premier–not the second or third, but the best–quarter-miler in the world.”
Davis has not budged. He appears resigned to sit out the indoor season, if not abandon track completely. He hasn’t run a race since the trials or gone near a practice track with the idea of doing much more than jogging.
The result is 20 extra pounds, most of it around his waistline. His once-lean 6-foot frame carries 185 pounds. He spends his time hanging wallpaper and hanging out.
He does the wallpapering with his father to earn some money. He does the hanging out to indulge his passion for playground football and to feed his daydreams of earning a college football scholarship.
“Everyone is teasing him about getting fat,” said Kennedy, who started coaching Davis when he was 14. “He just didn’t take proper care of himself.”
Davis’ decision two years ago to forgo a college track scholarship and enroll on his own at Pitt likewise has gone astray. He dropped his classes last October and is not sure he will return for the winter term.
Confident and cocky was the sprinter. Confused and confounded is Davis now.
“I really don’t know what my move is going to be,” he said. “I’ve had some family problems and some problems of my own. In the past, people told me to do things; I didn’t really think for myself. Now I have to do what my mind tells me to do. I have to be an independent person. I don’t want any advice from anybody. I have to do it my way.”
Lionell Dudley, another of Davis’ former coaches at Steel Valley, said Davis listened to the wrong advice. He said he urged Davis to accept a scholarship to UCLA and train under its respected coach, Jim Bush, now retired.
“He should have gone to UCLA,” Dudley said. “That was where it was all happening in ’84. The Coliseum, the Olympics, it was all there. If you ask me 100 times, 100 times my decision would have been for him to attend UCLA. Instead he was 17 years old and running against professionals in Madison Square Garden.
“It’s just a shame. It’s hard for me to believe that Clinton Davis is out of condition and not attending class. Clinton got burned out on the circuit before the Olympics. He was running professional when he should have been running college. I hope he can rebound if he has fallen. And if he has fallen, he was pushed.”
Davis and those closest to him are sensitive to criticism that he ran too hard, too soon and instead should have eased into world-class competition.
“A lot of people said we pushed him. But we didn’t,” Kennedy said. “We just let him go. You can’t hold him back if he does something well naturally. How can you hold him back without hurting him?”
It happened so fast. One day Davis was a 17-year-old senior at Steel Valley, pulling away from teammates in practice, the next he was taking on the world in Madison Square Garden. His Millrose Games victory was the first by a schoolboy since McTear had won the 60-yard dash in 1976.
Remember what happened to McTear? He dropped out of college, then dropped out of sight. When last heard from, he was living in Southern California, working as a delivery man for a catering firm and talking about a comeback.
Davis had no intention of following McTear into obscurity. He talked of chasing world records, of taking out the pace and paying the price. Four weeks later, he was back in New York.
This was an even more impressive performance. Davis held off 1981 World Cup champion Cliff Wiley in the first dead-heat finish in the 95-year history of the national indoor championships. It was his first U.S. title. His time of 47.64 seconds was a national scholastic record. The kid was for real.
Everything began to fall into place: 1983 high school track and field athlete of the year, invitations to the big meets and a European tour.
By December of 1983, he was on his way to a special U.S. Olympic development camp in Orlando, Fla., the youngest of an elite group selected by Olympic sprint coach Mel Rosen. Among the participants were eventual 400-meter gold medalist Alonzo Babers, and U.S. team members Walter McCoy and Willie Smith, seasoned veterans of international competition.
Davis was just the talented teen-ager. A few months removed from Steel Valley, all he lacked was experience. He had everything else.
“We invited the people we thought had a real chance of making the Olympic team, and we considered Davis among them,” Rosen said. “He had all the ingredients–speed, stamina, smoothness, and something no one can teach, a feel for the race.”
But Davis never made it to the Olympics. He got as far as the trials. There, on the same Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum track that would hold the Games six weeks later, his season ended.
His troublesome left hamstring couldn’t take the strain. Neither could Davis. He crumbled in tears.
For months, he sensed that something was wrong. Once carefree workouts became drudgery. He was eating poorly and sleeping late. Afterward he learned he was suffering from a strength-sapping virus. Long before that, he had lost his desire.
“The feeling was just not there,” Davis said recently. “Running just wasn’t there for some reason. I worked hard. And when the meets came I tried to run my best, but it wasn’t in my heart.”
He has not raced since.
During that heady winter of 1983, such an ending seemed improbable. Davis was at the threshold of what was to be an enlightened era of track and field. With the Summer Games a little more than a year away, equipment companies were pouring money into the sport. Everyone was looking for the next Carl Lewis to wear its shoes and sweats, even before most Americans had heard of the first Carl Lewis.
Where once a track athlete had to search just to find a college scholarship, Davis had his pick of schools and his pick of shoes. UCLA, Georgia, Pitt and Rosen at Auburn all wanted him. Nike, Puma and adidas wanted him too. It was like playing “Let’s Make a Deal” with a shiny new car behind every door.
But Davis turned down the college offers to work with Kennedy, who also coaches the Pitt women’s team. Because Davis qualified for financial aid based on need, he said he would have the best of both worlds. He would get a free education and train without being tied to the responsibilities of a college team.
His relationship with the shoe companies is less clear. Bush has charged that Davis accepted under-the-table payments. Kennedy said it is his club, not Davis, that has the agreement to wear adidas products in return for financial support.
Larry DeFreitas, adidas’ national director for track and field, also denies that his company has an agreement with Davis. But Davis and Kennedy said that if such an agreement existed, they could not acknowledge it without jeopardizing Davis’ future NCAA eligibility.
“I wasn’t running for the money; I was running for the sport. The first reason I stayed at home is that my parents wanted me to stay at home,” said Davis, who was adopted by Jerlene and McGuire Taylor when he was an infant. “I wanted to make a commitment to the (New Image) club. They enhanced my ability. They found me. They trained me. Coach Kennedy and I get along real well. He wanted me to stay with the club and keep my talents in the area.”
Other world-class runners, such as world-record hurdler Renaldo Nehemiah at Maryland and Lewis at Houston, gave up their collegiate eligibility to run independently and earn a living under international track and field’s liberalized rules. But first they spent at least two years in a college program.
“I’ve never seen a kid make a national or Olympic team without the benefit of a college program,” said Steve Simmons, a member of the U.S. Olympic staff who has coached Wiley and other world-class quarter-milers. “That’s never. Not one.”
As early as last winter, there were signs something was wrong. Davis won his second national indoor title, but his time slipped to 48.10 seconds. Rosen became concerned after watching Davis struggle to fifth place in a 300-yard dash in another indoor meet.
“He wasn’t as competitive as I’d seen him in the past,” Rosen said. “I talked to him. He didn’t know which way to go (in the Olympic trials)–the 200 or the 400 (meters).”
Rosen and many other coaches agree that the 400 is Davis’ natural event. But when Rosen ran into Davis four months later at an indoor meet, Davis was in the 200. He finished sixth in 21.25. The year before he had run 20.29. Rosen quickly wrote off Davis’ chances of making the Olympic team.
“This guy was avoiding the quarter mile,” Rosen said. “He wasn’t sharp. After that, I knew he wasn’t going to be a factor.”
Davis was finding the adjustment to living away from home difficult, even though it was only across the river at Pitt. He was staying up late, sleeping in, eating a lot at fast-food places and going out late with friends. In other words, doing the things most freshmen do at college, none of which is conducive to world-class sprinting.
He was rooming with Roger Kingdom, the eventual Olympic gold medalist in the 110-meter hurdles and his frequent training partner with the New Image club. Kingdom said he let Davis have his fun; he had gone through the same phase.
“When you first leave home, you try new things,” said Kingdom, a senior at Pitt. “He was a little undisciplined. And those things start to wear on you.”
It showed at practice. Davis was lethargic. He could not complete the workouts. He would vomit. Sometimes he would skip practice altogether. And, for the first time, Kingdom was beating him in the sprints. Soon Kennedy abandoned hope of training Davis for the 400.
“The (virus) hit him early and then the training just didn’t come along,” Kennedy said. “The 200 is less stress, so we put him there. But two weeks before the trials, he couldn’t even do the workouts.”
Several weeks before Davis arrived in Los Angeles, he was resigned to defeat. He began talking about playing football and how football–not track–was his first love.
“It was always my dream to play football,” said Davis, who returned kicks and was a reserve receiver at Steel Valley. “I think I should maybe go professional.”
Reality isn’t that simple.
In Los Angeles, Davis hardly left the dorms. He rarely ventured the few blocks to the Coliseum to watch the competition. Knowing what could have been and sensing what was about to happen, sitting in the stands would have been too painful.
“He spent a lot of time sleeping,” Kennedy said. “He didn’t want to watch if he couldn’t compete well. He played the machines (video games) more than anyone there. But he couldn’t fool me.”
Davis’ time on the track was brief: trials and quarterfinals of the 200. His Olympic dream was over by noon.
The second-guessing was inevitable. Even adidas, whose money some say tempted Davis in the first place, joined the cry.
“He was not as successful as we thought he would be,” DeFreitas said. “We would have felt much better if he was in week-in-and-week-out competition. I have to agree a little with Jimmy (Bush at UCLA) that a college program would have been best.”
Kingdom is defensive about whispers that Kennedy took advantage of Davis and his earning potential; that Kennedy used Davis to promote himself and land the adidas deal for the club and that when Davis faltered and Kingdom came into his own, Kennedy abandoned Davis.
“There are a lot of rumors that now that I’m doing well Ken (Kennedy’s nickname) is forgetting about Clinton,” Kingdom said. “Well, Ken stayed with Clinton ever since he was a little kid. A lot of people say Ken kept him from going away to UCLA. But who knows what would have happened if he got out there and this happened? He would have been lost.”
Kingdom and Kennedy say Davis needs the stability of living near home. They say Davis has retained his NCAA eligibility, and if joining a college team is what is needed, the option remains open. Their concern is that Davis makes his own decision.
“Clinton is going to have to do it for himself,” Kingdom said. “If not and he does not do well, he’ll blame us. And that’s not what we want to happen. We want Clinton to take responsibility for his actions.”
Davis ran into trouble when he found competing consistently at a world-class level far removed from coasting through the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Assn. championships. Life was more than a quick dash.
“Clinton is used to having things fairly easy, and I don’t mean just running,” Kennedy said. “He’s had some family problems, and he’s the find of kid I found cannot handle all of that at one time. Clinton is a follower, not a leader. The true test is if Clinton can get his head together, come back and maybe take the risk of getting beat by some good people.
“Clinton is very special to me, and it’s not because he ran fast. He’s like a son. I want him to come to practice, but I’m not going to beg. I’m not going to call. He knows I’m here every day. He’s going through a transition, finding what he’s about as a person.”
Davis’ friends say his misfortune was that the Olympics occurred at the same time he was trying to cope with being on his own. Until he learns that lesson, they say, athletics is secondary.
“Like any person, not just an athlete, Clinton is going through a crisis transition from that teen-age status to young adult,” Kingdom said. “You face a lot of problems, personality problems. You think everything is going to be handed to you. Then something sets you off on a tangent. Everyone has to back off and let Clinton work things out himself.”
Former Steel Valley High School track standout Clinton Davis was inducted into the WPIAL Hall of Fame at the Radisson Hotel in Green Tree.
Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette
South Xtra: Steel Valley’s Davis a legend as sprinter
WPIAL HALL OF FAME August 18, 2011 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Chris Adamski, Tri-State Sports & News Service
If Rick Dunmire had heard it once, he heard it 1,000 times.
When you’re a track and field and football coach, as Dunmire had been at Steel Valley High School for several years, people are always coming to you with “the next big thing.”
The midget football speedster, the kid who’s never lost a playground race, the 12-year-old who beat a Volkswagen Rabbit in a drag race.
“You might hear that just about every week,” Dunmire said recently with a bit of a chuckle.
So it was around this time of year 32 years ago, when Dunmire was told of the then-urban legend of a kid who had moved from Braddock to Homestead for that school year.
That kid was Clinton Davis.
Davis hadn’t even formally run track yet at that point. But he would graduate from Steel Valley four years later as, quite simply, the greatest sprinter the WPIAL has ever seen.
Ask Dunmire how good Davis could have been, and his answer is simple.
“At the same age,” Dunmire said, “his times were better than Carl Lewis’.
“You can take it from there.”
Davis, whose PIAA records in the 200- and 400-meter dashes still stand 28 years after he set them, was inducted into the WPIAL Hall of Fame Class of 2011 earlier this summer.
“It’s a big honor, a real great honor to be there,” Davis said.
Davis is a jovial man who turned 46 yesterday and still lives in Homestead.
It doesn’t take long in talking to him on the phone to realize how much fun he has in his daily life and how he could raise the spirits of those around him with his fun-loving personality.
In fact, it doesn’t even take actually reaching him on the phone — his answering message says it all. Davis, known as “Big Daddy” to his friends, loudly sings, “You’ve reached Big Daddy, Incorporated, Everything I do, I do it big. Yeah, go Steelers” — pausing at one point in the recording for a hearty laugh.
“I want to entertain; I like to entertain,” Davis said. “It’s all about having a good time. I was a silly guy, but I figured that I was in it to have fun, and everyone else was in it to have fun.
“What we did on the track team was have a good time … but when it was time to get on the track, it was serious then. We focused on being No. 1 every single time. Those four years were great, especially my senior year.”
George Novak, the longtime football coach and athletic director at Woodland Hills, was the football coach at Steel Valley when Davis was there.
“He was a special athlete, and a special kid; a great kid, too,” Novak said. “Just a real nice kid. He always had a smile on his face, always was a happy-go-lucky kid. He was friends with everybody.”
But Davis was more than just an outgoing extrovert who made friends. Novak is one of the best football coaches in the history of the WPIAL, having won five titles at Woodland Hills and the 1982 Class AAA championship — with Davis as a wide receiver who was probably more of a decoy than anything else — at Steel Valley.
Novak has coached as many future NFL players as any coach in the WPIAL, including two currently in the league at “speed” positions in Steve Breaston and Ryan Mundy. But Novak still was emphatic in his confidence in saying Davis was “the fastest kid I’ve ever coached.”
Davis’ speed transcended that of Friday night football, even in this tradition-rich football region. By the time he was in high school, football wasn’t Davis’ game. Speed was.
“No question, he would have been in the Olympics,” Novak said. “He was unbelievable. Just pure speed, a world-class sprinter. He was just amazing.”
Davis’ world-class speed afforded him the opportunity to travel around the globe to compete against the fastest in the world.
Among the highlights of his high school years was when he won a gold medal at the 1982 Junior Pan Am Games, or when he won a sprint at the international-level Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Against that backdrop, his historically dominating runaway wins at the PIAA championships seem to almost pale in comparison.
“Getting to travel and experience so much and go to schools and be recruited and see so many places, at a young age, that was real nice,” Davis said.
The irony was that Davis never really wanted to run track as a youth. Him telling the story of how he got talked into it is vintage Davis.
“Coach [Dunmire] said, ‘You want to come out for the track team?'” Davis recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know nothing about track.’ But he said, ‘With your speed, you can win a lot of races if we work with you.’ I still wasn’t convinced.
“But then he put the final word down: ‘You get to get out of school early.’
“I said, ‘There you go, buddy, I’m coming out for track!’
“I was happy, not because I’d get to run track, but because I’d get to get out of school early.”
Through all the laughs, the sad part of the Davis story is that he never did reach his full potential. A primary reason why was a serious auto accident at the age of 25 that left him with both legs badly broken in multiple places.
Sponsors fled after the injury, and, indeed, Davis never again was the same elite sprinter he had been. But he did work himself back into shape after being told that wouldn’t be possible, and he ended up still being faster, at that point, than most humans could ever dream of being.
“I should have been dead and gone,” Davis said. “Thank God, he helped me there, and he helped me there for a reason — to go out there and try to help kids to not make the same mistakes I did, live productive lives. It really changed my life for the better, changed my focus on life.”
Today, Davis coaches as part of the East Allegheny Summer Youth track program. But despite his “Big Daddy” nickname and infectious attention-drawing persona, he downplays his past as a local athletic legend.
“People get mad at me, people I’ve known for a long time I’m always eating or drinking with all these years,” Davis said. “They’ll hear me say my name and they’ll say, ‘Big Daddy? I’ve known you for 15 years; you’re not Clinton Davis, the guy who used to run. NO WAY you’re Clinton Davis. How could I have known you all this time and you never told me you are THE Clinton Davis? I’ve known you all these years, and you’re the greatest runner who’s ever come from here.'”
Just another example of how the legend of Clinton Davis lives on.
“I’m biased,” Dunmire said, “but I don’t think that anybody who actually saw him run would debate what I’ll say to you: He’s the best sprinter that the WPIAL — and probably the state — has ever seen.”
Something of a happy ending, I think.
Meanwhile, can’t help wondering how many times Nike stock has split since 1984. When I last owned a share.