Word: patton
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...ever run by Paddock (9.5). Then he squeezed out a mite more speed and equaled the world's record (9.4), first set by Frank Wykoff,‡ another old U.S.C. hero. Was it possible to pump more speed out of human legs? It was. At Fresno, Calif, this spring, Patton ran his unbelievable 9.3. His archrival, Lloyd La Beach, was only inches behind...
Forbidden Subject. In Southern California, the Patton-La Beach rivalry was a high spot of every big meet. Betting odds were freely quoted in Los Angeles bars and barbershops. One night at Los Angeles' Coliseum, a record crowd of 59,661 turned out for a meet and saw Patton...
...season the subject of running was rarely mentioned in the Patton home. Mel never read the sport pages: "I might begin believing those things they write." When the afternoon paper was delivered to their neat, $35-a-month apartment on Beverly Hills' Burton Way, his wife tore out the sport section and put it away. As sensitive to excitement as a punch-drunk fighter is to bells, Patton didn't want any gongs ringing inside...
...wife always took over the night before a race. Brown-eyed Shirley Ann Patton, with whom Mel "started going steady" in the seventh grade, would invite friends over, instructing them in advance to talk about everything but track. When Mel went to bed, around midnight, he slept quietly. Next morning, Shirley Ann found odd jobs for him to do, and kept a string of small talk going to stall off thoughts of the race until about 11 o'clock. Then, as they parked two-year-old Susan with grandma and got ready to leave, inside Mel Patton the current...
...Patton before a race. The split second the gun goes off, all this pent-up emotion explodes...