The Last Hundred

It takes so little to set Sprinter Mel Patton's delicate nerves to jangling that he never reads the sport pages before a race. But he could not help knowing that the East had a challenger for his championship, a lanky Negro lad named Andy Stanfield, from Seton Hall College (N.J.). The night before the N.C.A.A. championships, Patton's wife artfully kept his mind off the race. He didn't begin to work himself into a state--in which his placid disposition turns sour and he fails to recognize his best friends--until just before he set out for Los Angeles' Olympic Coliseum last week.

When Patton got on the blocks for the 100-yard final, athletes from 75 colleges paused to watch the great sprinter run his last hundred for the University of Southern California. At the gun, Patton uncoiled like a spring, his long, slender legs pumping, with Stanfield right beside him in an adjoining lane. In the last 20 yards, Patton pulled away enough to win by a yard in 9.7 (slow time compared to the world record 9.3 he hung up last year at Fresno, Calif.).

In the 220, Patton and Stanfield again ran like a team to the halfway mark, where Patton went into his relaxed "float" and won by two strides in 20.4 (equaling Ralph Metcalfe's 16-year-old N.C.A.A. record). Said Stanfield afterwards: "I figured I'd stay with him, then coast . . . then I had to run like hell to catch up as close as I did." Patton, the tension over, was out of sight as usual, racked and retching with violent nausea. With the help of his two victories, U.S.C. breezed off with the team championship. The score: Southern Cal. 55 2/5, U.C.L.A. 31, Stanford 30, Michigan State 26, Penn State 25. The day's outstanding individual performance: a 56-ft.-1 1/2-in. heave of the shot by Yale's Jim Fuchs, who is also a pretty good halfback in season; Fuchs's toss broke the N.C.A.A. record of another footballer-shot putter, the late Al Blozis of Georgetown, by one inch.

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