I'd noticed him watching me for a year or so, especially when we'd play games where there was running or jumping.

In the space of less than seven days, I attended a track meet in Boston, flew from there to Bowling Green for the National Jaycees, then to Rochester for the blind, Buffalo for another track meet, New York to shoot a film called The Black Athlete, Miami for Ford Motor Company, back up to New York for 45 minutes to deliver a speech, then into L. A. for another the same night.

It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere - one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.

I always loved running.... It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.

It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn't even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

I fought, I fought harder . . . but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.