Track & Field

Top outdoor tests for college track & field athletes are the annual championships of the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America, held in New York City from 1877 to 1903. later shuttled between Cambridge and Philadelphia. Last week, after 34 years' absence, the I. C. 4-A returned to New York. The championships were held in the city's new Randalls Island Stadium.

Co-favorites to win the team title were Columbia, which last won the outdoor I. C. 4-A in 1879, and Pittsburgh, which never had won. Mainstays of both colleges were Negroes: Columbia's Captain Benjamin Washington Johnson and Pitt's tall (6 ft. 4 in.) John Y. Woodruff, neither of whom had won an I. C. 4-A title. When fleet little Ben Johnson not only whizzed home first in .the 100-yd. dash and won the broad jump, but also reeled off a 220-yd. semifinal in a near-record 21 sec., Columbia thought the championships already won. Thereupon Pitt's Woodruff, in the quarter-and half-mile races, duplicated Johnson's double victory, loping through the quarter-mile in nine-foot strides to tie the intercollegiate record of 47 sec. flat. A Pitt sprinter pulled up lame in the 220-yd. semi-finals but Columbia had missed a third place in the broad jump by 3/8 in. By the end of the afternoon Pitt and Columbia were not two points apart and the 3/8-in. margin proved crucial. In the determining 220-yd. final, last event on the program, Columbia's Ben Johnson zoomed through to his third I. C. 4-A title, but Pitt's Edgar Mason placed second to give Pitt the team title with 30 1/2 points to Columbia's 30. Only I. C. 4-A record-breaker was James Hucker of Cornell who cut 4/10 sec. off the 220-yd. low hurdles mark set in 1898.

Notable absentees from the Randalls Island meet were three erstwhile I. C. 4-A winners, Stanford, University of Southern California and University of California, which last week competed, with seven other teams, in their own Pacific Coast Conference championships. At last month's Stanford-Southern California dual meet, Southern California's Bill Sefton and Earle Meadows pole-vaulted to a record 14 ft. 8 1/2 in. At Los Angeles last week, Sefton and Meadows duplicated the feat by both vaulting 14 ft. 11 in., a full 4 1/2 inches higher than George Varoffs accepted world's record. Also broken was the world's record for the mile relay which Washington State's quartet finished in 3:12.3. High meet scores: Southern California 55, Stanford 54, Washington State 37.

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