Thirteen steps to glory

MOSCOW — It would be misleading to sum up Edwin Moses’ amazing track and field career by pointing to a single numeral, especially one as superstitiously fraught as 13. Moses himself suggests his background in physics and engineering played a role in his uncanny success in the 400-meter hurdles.

But there’s a logic behind the title of the star-studded documentary “Moses: 13 Steps,” which Moses — a golden presence in the track world — presented to a packed house Sunday on a rainy afternoon at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre in Moscow.

In winning his premier event as a 20-year-old neophyte in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the 6-foot-2 Moses was one of the world’s few competitors who consistently “went 13 strides,’’ wielding his height and grace to move from one hurdle to the next in that seemingly impossibly small number of steps, through the entire 10 hurdles.

“We had a kid named Jim Allen who ran 13 steps,” John Chaplin, the retired Washington State University men’s track coach, said by phone last week. “But 90% of the guys ran 15 steps.

“Now, the guy who broke the world record after Moses (the 6-foot-4 Kevin Young), he ran 12,” Chaplin added. “That means he alternated (his lead step over the hurdles). Nobody has done that but him.”

But nobody won as consistently as Moses. Setting a professional sports record that boggles the mind, he prevailed in 122 consecutive races in the men’s 400 hurdles between 1977 and 1987, claiming Olympic titles in 1976 and 1984, bracketing the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Games.

Moses, who will turn 70 in August, spent more than an hour talking to appreciative viewers before and after the 1-hour, 45-minute film. Famously stoic during his athletic career, he seemed entirely at ease socializing amid students and academics, including baby boomers who remember watching him on ABC track broadcasts four and five decades ago.

The event was closely tied to the University of Idaho’s Black History Month, and after the film Moses was sporting a jacket from Morehouse College, the historically Black college in Atlanta he’d attended in the 1970s, along with film-world stars Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, both of whom are featured talking heads in the movie.

Another famed Black actor, Morgan Freeman, serves as executive producer of the film, and actually inspired the making of it with his rhetorical question years ago, “Why is there no film on Edwin Moses?”

Well, one reason it took so long was the mostly uncontroversial life of the subject, who had grown up in Dayton, Ohio, and steeped himself in academics as a child. He said he was the smallest player on his high school football team and arrived at Morehouse on an academic scholarship, majoring in physics and industrial engineering and turning out for track as an afterthought.

“No one was looking at me when I went to Morehouse,” he said Sunday in a post-film interview by WSU sports management professor Alex Gang. “We had no track, no field, no stadium. They had one set of weights you could probably get at Walmart or someplace.

“So my whole perspective in track and field,” he said, “was not as an athlete but really as an academic.”

His physical development came late, but it came with a vengeance. Midway through his college career, he switched track events to the 400 hurdles and made astounding strides,

“I remember the day at Westwood (Calif.) in 1976, in what’s now called the U.S. Nationals and — then it was the AAU,” recalled Rob Cassleman, of Pullman, who’d been among the world’s top-ranked hurdlers for four years.

“This guy from Morehouse showed up. I’d seen he’d run a sub-50-second time. Morehouse was I think a Division III school, so he wasn’t a world-beater at that time. I said, ‘I saw your time, good going and good luck’ — that sort of thing. He placed fourth in that particular meet.

“But then at the Olympic trials, I ran against him in the semifinal heat. He won that, and I was fourth or fifth. But he went nuts after that.”

Before the year was out, he was an Olympic champion with a world-record time of 47.63 seconds, which he eventually lowered to 47.02 by 1983.

Cassleman, who went on to become head women’s track coach at WSU for a decade, watched the Moses film with his son John, who excelled at the 400 hurdles at WSU two decades ago.

The movie, produced by German filmmakers who’d long been Moses fans, pieces together Moses family home movies with archival footage of his track career, sprinkled among dozens of interviews. There’s a dignity to the film that matches Moses’ own. It debuted at Morehouse last fall and is still looking for a way to be seen by a wider audience.

There’s no way to explain Moses’ sudden transformation from a physics nerd to a brilliant track athlete. But at the heart of the change was the transition to 13 strides

“We were finding out that you needed to run 13 strides as long as you could,” Cassleman said, “and for most of us that meant about half the race, about five hurdles. Then you go through a period of 14 or 15 to the end.

“And Ed was doing it every night, every day, 13 all the way. He has these rangy strides. The fact that he could combine his natural speed with his ability to go 13 strides was a game-changer.”

Grummert can be reached at (208) 848-2275 or daleg@lmtribune.com