Bellbrook graduation 2012
Fairfield Senior 2012 graduation
Kroger Aquatic Center opens
Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2009 > August > 17
Monday, August 17, 2009
OSU’s Brandon Saine — Would he leave Pryor in his dust?
COLUMBUS — With all the debate over the rocket-like 4.33 second time in the 40 yard dash Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor supposedly ran during summer drills in Columbus — and only ONE player ran faster at the NFL Combine earlier this year — who better to ask about it than backfield teammate Brandon Saine?
After all, the Bucks’ junior running back from Piqua High is a true track phenom.
He won four state track titles and a national championship in the 60-yard dash when he was in high school. He still holds the Ohio Division I record in the 100-meter dash with a time of 10.38 seconds. While officially timed at 4.40 seconds in the 40, he’s been unofficially clocked at 4.25 seconds.
With a little tongue-in-cheek needling the other day, Saine was asked:
“So, if they lined you and Pryor up next to each other in the blocks, you’d smoke the guy, right?”
A bit taken back, Saine suddenly turned from a sprinter into a dancer and tried waltzing right around the question.
“Aaaah…I don’t know,” he said with a smile.
“C’mon,” he was prodded. “You’ve probably run hundreds of races.”
Saine grinned and shrugged: “Yeah, I’ve run a few more track meets so maybe I’d have an advantage because I know my way around. But he’s a really fast guy. It’d be a real good, fun race.”
He said he was there the day Pryor supposedly shattered the stop watches: “I wasn’t surprised. He has incredibly long strides He’s a quick guy for as big as he is.”
Asked what he ran that day, Saine said “a high 4.3.”
“Still you’d smoke him, right?” Saine was teased.
By now you could tell he kind of liked the question, though he feigned rebuff: “Man, you are trying to get me in trouble.”
Well then, at least you’re better looking than Pryor, right?”
Saine shock a quick glance at the sophomore quarterback — who happened to be standing about 10 yards away surrounded by reporters — then grinned: “Definitely not.”
When he saw his questioner shake his head in mock disappointment, he shrugged: “Well, we’re both good lookin’.”
Whether they are the best looking backfield mates in college football is for another debate, but they very well could be the fastest this year.
And just as many are anticipating Pryor’s first full season as the Bucks starting quarterback, this could be Saine’s break-out year after two modest seasons at OSU that bear little resemblance to his glory days at Piqua High.
As a high school senior, Saine was Ohio’s Mr. Football, rushing for 1,895 yards and 27 touchdowns on 259 carries, catching 30 passes for another 412 yards and leading the Indians to the Division II state title.
At Ohio State, he rushed for 267 yards as a freshman and, used sparingly last season, ran for just 65 on 26 attempts.
But the other day OSU offensive coordinator Jim Bollman was talking about Saine being one of the Bucks two primary ball carriers this season.
Thanks to the weight room, Saine said he’s gotten stronger since last season and, more importantly, “I really know what I’m doing now rather than overthinking things and hurting myself.” Because of that he said he’s getting a lot more reps in practice so far this preseason.
Asked if he fantasizes about a return to those glory days he had on the field as a PIqua Indian, he thought a few seconds, then smiled and nodded:
“As I sit here and think about it, it’s been a while since I’ve been in the open field just running away from people. I’d really like that to be part of the picture again. I’d love to just run away from somebody out there.”
“Starting with Pryor?”
He smiled and shook his head, but he was prodded again:
“C’mon, be truthful.”
Finally, he nodded and grinned:
“Sure, that’d be a real good start.”
TweetCOLUMN: Hyleas Fountain — “I Need A Woman Like You” …(the kids do, too)
The envelope’s return address was the give-away.
“When I see that big, long number up in the corner I know it’s more fan mail from jail cells,” Hyleas Fountain said with a smile. “There’s this one guy who wrote something like, ‘I can’t wait ‘til I get out. I want to buy you an ice cream cone. Not one, but like 12.”
Then there are the hundreds of young people among her 2,000-plus Facebook followers — many of them school girls from here in the Miami Valley and across the nation — who send regular messages to the Olympic silver medalist from Dayton.
“One young lady was from New Jersey, I think,” Fountain said. “She wanted wanted me to call her principal and help her change her track program at her school.”
Her biggest following may well be from Germany — where she regularly competes when touring Europe — but she’s popular back here, too.
She threw out the first pitch at the Dayton Dragons game earlier this month, a Kettering bank has featured her photo in an ad and, of course, there are those lovestruck guys — some a little creepy, some just heartfelt:
“One guy sent me a message saying, ‘You compete so hard out there. I need a woman like you. Where have you been all my life?’”
Such is life since the 28-year-old heptathlete won her Olympic medal exactly one year ago today — August 16, 2008 — at the Beijing Games. It made her the only American woman other than Jackie Joyner Kersee ever to win an Olympic heptathlon medal.
And to answer that one guy: Where Fountain is today — much to her dismay — is here in Dayton, rather than at the World Championships in Berlin.
The heptathlon competition is wrapping up there today and Fountain — rated No. 2 in the world — was figured to contend for the title, especially after the way she’d dominated the the first five of the seven events at the U.S. Championships in Eugene, Oregon seven weeks ago.
Having the meet of her life, she appeared on track to reach 6,900 points, which would have put her behind only Swedish superstar Carolina Kluft for the best mark in the world in 13 years.
But then — thanks to one, violent snap of the neck — she found herself being carried out of the stadium on a stretcher. As she was put in the back of an ambulance — while Lynn Smith, her personal coach and Central State’s women’s coach jumped in the front — she started to panic:
“I’d lost the feeling in my upper body.”
xxxxxxxx
A SILVER MEDAL WITH A FEW NICKS
The biggest surprise she had in Beijing was the flood of feelings that washed over her as she stood on the medal podium that night at the crowded, red-lit Bird’s Nest Stadium.
“I didn’t think I’d be so emotional, but at the biggest moment of my life I had come though,” she said. “And to see the flag raised and to hear the crowd and see my mom and sister in the front row and know we were all experiencing it together, it just overwhelmed me.”
Initially, Fountain won bronze, but then Ukrainian silver medalist Lyudmila Blonska tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltestosterone, was stripped of her hardware and literally thrown out of the Olympic Village.
It was Blonska’s second doping offense and she was given a lifetime ban. “You probably won’t ever see her again,” Fountain said. “She can’t compete, can’t coach, probably can’t even walk on her own streets anymore. That’s the price you pay.”
As she headed back to Dayton after the Games — to serve as grand marshal of Kettering’s Holiday at Home parade and then be honored at the Wilmington Pike Home Depot, where she’d worked in the garden department before Beijing — she said she had her medal “zippered up in my pocket because somebody told me about an athlete who once lost their medal on the flight home.”
So as she sat in a Kettering cafe and talked last week, where was her medal now?
“I think it’s on my kitchen table,” she said. “I was in my friend’s wedding in New Jersey last week and brought it along because a lot of her little cousins wanted to see it.”
She started to smile: “It’s got a few nicks in it. When I went back to my hometown (Harrisburg, Pa.) some of the little kids at the school were pretty excited and they dropped it a few times.”
But while Walter Payton once got his Super Bowl ring pilfered at a school, she laughed and said she wasn’t too worried:
“I tell everybody ahead of time, ‘Don’t try leaving out that door with my medal. I will run you down and catch you.””
xxxxxxxxx
FROM STIFF NECK TO SOFT HEART
She’d heard about the post-Olympic problems athletes face:
“They say the year after the Games is very hard on athletes because of all the stress from the Trials and then again at the Olympics.”
She figured she’d be fine, though, especially after winning again last fall in Talence, France as she wrapped up her season with meets in Europe, Japan and China.
At the U.S. Championships in late June, she strained her neck during the high jump, the second event of the two-day competition.
“It happened when I was jumping 6-feet on my first attempt,” she said. “It was like whiplash. I threw my head back and looked to the side when I jumped and then when I landed I rolled and crunched it.
“They worked on it between events, but I finished the day pretty stiff. I shouldn’t have come back the next day, but I was on a roll. I was scoring big and I was like ‘it’s for the world championships.’”
The next day she landed her best long jump ever — 22 feet, 9 3/4 inches — but aggravated her neck again. This time her body started to go numb.
So with a big lead and just two events to go, she was forced to withdraw, costing her the U.S. crown and keeping her from qualifying for the world championships.
“As they were taking me away, all I wanted to do was get back on the track,” she said quietly. “I nearly worked myself up into an asthma attack.”
Treated for a strained neck, she missed some meets, but she’s back competing again. She leaves this week for Estonia, followed by some other European and Asian stops.
Like many athletes from the Beijing Games, she hasn’t found her Olympic accomplishments to be a springboard to financial opportunity in these tough economic times.
She’d like to do some modeling and thinks a reality show would be fun. “Something like The T.O. Show,” she said of Terrell Owens’ offering on VH1. “The one with athletes and supermodels and all. Now that’d be cool.”
And while she seems to have the portfolio for all that — looks, personality and big-time success — she’s finding her true calling as a role model to young people.
She has spoken at several schools around Dayton and is a huge hit back home in Pennsylvania.
“At my old middle school, the kids were all out front with posters to greet me when I drove up,” she said. “Inside they had my pictures everywhere on the walls and in the (trophy) cases.
“All the kids came to the auditorium and some of my old teachers who are retired now were there. They’re the people who helped me keep on the right track and it was emotional. I cried all day.
“They had a slide show of me set to music, students asked questions and then they read me their essays. One topic was ‘Why I want to be like Hyleas Fountain.’ The other was ‘Why I want to have lunch with Hyleas.’
“It was nice. There were some real creative ones.
Then she smiled because, of course, none of the lunch bunch quite topped the guy back here.
No one offered to buy her an ice cream cone — “not one, but like 12.”
Tweet
