Danny Harris ran with such power and certainty that it seemed he could sprint past any obstacle, the wind at his back.
We saw this first in 1984, when an 18-year-old Harris took to the hot Los Angeles Coliseum track and grabbed an Olympic silver medal in the 400-meter hurdles.
"I'm just a kid," he recalls, "there on the track, 90,000 people in the stands, knowing it is all going to be over in a 47-second race. [During the race] you don't hear anything. All of those people and it's quiet in your head until you cross the finish line. Then I heard the crowd again."
We saw it again in 1987, when Harris stunned the legendary Edwin Moses in Madrid, ending Moses' 122-race winning streak.
More, much more, was expected: multiple Olympics, quite possibly multiple gold medals. Handsome and charming, three times a national champion at Iowa State, Harris was poised to be one of the faces of American track and field well into the 1990s.
None of this was to be. The power Harris took to the track wasn't enough to conquer his toughest foe -- an addiction to cocaine that took root shortly after he failed, just barely, to make the 1988 Olympic team. There weren't any more Olympic medals. The Perris-raised hurdler's fight with addiction turned into a twisting journey.
Since the early '90s, there have been sober years when he has beaten back the foe to run fast and well enough to hold down good jobs, often as a personal trainer. Those stretches have been pockmarked by painful moments when he lost control and gave in to the urge to use.
Still, there is hope in his story. For if bouncing back from humiliation, if battling inner demons straight-on is the best measure of a man, then Danny Harris is making a turn toward the backstretch in fine position.
"When you look back, I've actually had more time doing fine than not," says Harris, looking fit in the midst of a long spell of sobriety. But he does not hide from the fact that the addiction is always there. It took him "to terrible places I would not normally go, put me around people I would not normally hang around. I can't dwell on that, though. . . . Now I get up every day and look forward. This is more the way Danny Harris was before drugs."
I first spotted him late last year while I watched a basketball game between homeless and addicted men at a skid row shelter. Harris immediately stood out, a well-muscled man sprinting powerfully up and down the court, leading the team from the Midnight Mission.
