Great strides
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Bill Livingston
Plain Dealer Columnist
Columbus
-- Ted Ginn Jr. makes it look too easy. Football is supposed to be hard, nasty, and brutish.
"He's the fastest man in college football, already," Harrison Dillard, the certifiable Cleveland track legend, said of Ginn, the Ohio State freshman from Glenville High School.
There are Saturdays when Dillard, the Olympic 100-meters gold medalist in 1948, the Olympic 110 hurdles gold medalist in 1952, looks at his TV set and sees in Ginn a glimmer of the greatness that inspired him all those years ago.
"He doesn't look like he's trying," said Dillard. "All great sprinters give that impression of effortlessness. Jesse Owens, my idol, looked like he was sitting in a chair when he ran."
Ginn outruns the angles of geometry. There are times when he turns the corner, and you know without a shadow of a doubt that the only thing that could catch him would require wheels and high-test in the tank.
Ginn has scored seven touchdowns, gaining 771 all-purpose yards, while only touching the ball 40 times. He was an Associated Press third team All-American, a remarkable achievement for a player used sparingly. The only serious threat to touch a pigskin less often might have been the big, bad wolf when he was stymied by the third little pig's brick house.
"They had him switching between offense and defense in summer drills. They had to decide how to use him," said Ohio State track coach Russ Rogers.
It took most of the season for Jim Tressel's buttoned-down staff to figure it out. The answer, basically, was to put him in the slot or on the flanks and to use him on screens and misdirection plays. Southern Cal does things like this with Reggie Bush. Long ago, Johnny Rodgers, a feared punt returner, played such a role at Nebraska and won a Heisman Trophy.
For Ginn to play tailback would probably mean bulking up so much that it would end his Olympic dreams in track. "The way I've been getting the ball this year is fine. I'm not a greedy person," he said.
The USA Olympic sprints coach in 1988, Rogers thinks Ginn's best event in track will be the 110-meter high hurdles. "But he could make the Olympics in the 400 meters and the 400-meter hurdles, too," Rogers said.
Ginn says he'll decide between the football and track when the time comes. If he has a great junior season in 2006, it might be difficult to put the NFL on hold to train for the Olympics.
"For the Olympics, you have to train a lot. You have to take a year off and actually train for one race. That's a lot of work. You can't do both," said Ginn, who will run track for OSU in the spring and perhaps in the winter, too.
Such a decision will be a "big biggie," unlike all of Ginn's touchdowns.
"No big biggie," Ginn will say after he "takes it to the house." It reeks of confidence, although he casts it in a softer light. "It's my way of staying humble," he said. "It's not a big biggie. My teammates helped me score the touchdowns."
Nicely said, but not necessarily true. Only FedEx delivers to the house as efficiently as Ginn.
Ginn had an adjustment period when he dropped a couple of passes on slant patterns, passes that were just waiting to emerge from the touchdown incubator. "It took him a little while to adjust to how fast the ball comes out of there when we're in an empty set and don't have anyone back to block," said Tressel. "But he has excellent hands."
Ginn's broken-field zig-zag with a deflected pass against Indiana was a tour de magnum force.
Perhaps his best catch of the year came when he and Santonio Holmes played you-take-it, I-got- it on a Michigan punt. "Teddy kept looking this way," said Tressel, swiveling his head from side- to-side, in mimicry of Ginn looking for the more experienced Holmes to take charge.
"I don't know that we ever got the call made," Tressel said. "Teddy reached out and caught it on his fingertips at the last second. I'm thinking, Ohhhh, we don't need to fumble this punt.' And, good Lord, 82 yards later we have a touchdown."
The last guy with a shot at him was the Michigan punter. Even though he had the angle on Ginn, it was the same story as when Ginn didn't even have to fake the Penn State punter. He just lit the afterburner. "He had no shot," said Ginn, flatly.
Football is filled with track guys who didn't make it big or at all. The fictional model for them was Al "Abort" Goodwin, the sprinter-turned-receiver in "Semi-Tough," who would outrun the quarterback's arm.
Renaldo "Skeets" Nehemiah, the world's best high hurdler, was so bummed out by the 1980 American Olympic boycott that he left track and collected a Super Bowl ring as a bit player with the San Francisco 49ers. "Nehemiah didn't come out of anywhere near as good a high school program as Glenville. He wasn't anywhere near as good a football player," snorted Rogers.
For a time, Rogers worked as a "speed coach" with the New York Giants. One of the defensive backs was 1964 Olympic 200 meters gold medalist Henry Carr. "Henry would always psyche himself up when Bob Hayes [the Olympic 100 gold medalist] came to town [with the Dallas Cowboys]," said Rogers. "But he couldn't run backward fast enough and Hayes usually got him."
In the NFL of the 1960s, Hayes was, simply, electrifying. Both Dillard and Rogers say Hayes, his arms surging like pistons, gave off a palpable sense of how fast he was moving. Fluid runners fool tacklers with their easy-chair speed. "Bullet Bob" intimidated them. He moved like something out of the ballistics lab.
Hayes was a football player, too, coming to the pros after playing for Jake Gaithers at Florida A&M. "Teddy is a football player for sure," said Tressel. "Don't say he's a football player too."
There is a symbiosis between track and football. Hurdlers, accustomed to hitting barriers and plowing ahead, might undergo the best track training of all for a contact sport like football. "Ted has such good balance. That's critical for football. He gets that from the hurdles," said Rogers.
"The hurdles take great hand- eye coordination," said Dillard. "Two arms, two legs, the head and the body are all doing something different at the same time."
Tressel is all for putting his speed guys in track after the season. "Just clearing the three extra inches from high school [where hurdles are 39 inches high, compared to the collegiate 42] will give him more explosiveness," said Tressel.
Rogers has worked with such Buckeye players as wide receivers Joey Galloway, Michael Jenkins and Chris Sanders and running back Butler By'not'e.
With the receivers, the lesson was simple. Run to the ball when it seems overthrown. Do not reach up for it until the last second. Keep your arms moving as long as possible. "People think the legs carry you, but it's really the arms," said Rogers.
"Ted runs straight forward," said Rogers in analyzing Ginn's style. "Most people don't. Their foot goes to the right. His strides are directly one behind the other. He has a natural body lean, like Jesse Owens and [world 200 and 400 record-holder] Michael Johnson. And he has very quick feet. A lot of players have quick feet for 25-30 yards. Ted has it for the full field."
So, does any of that explain those smooth strides that amount to 19.3 yards and a cloud of dust every time Ginn touches the ball?
"You can work on mechanics all you want," Dillard said. "That's God's gift."
