Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens, like all black athletes of his era, was born too early to cash in on the millions, even the thousands, that runners such as Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses and Michael Johnson can make today. After Owens won his four gold medals in Berlin in 1936, the best he could do when he returned home was to race for a few bucks against horses in 100-yard sprints as a sideshow at carnivals. Even that was a sham, Owens revealed later. The races were rigged.

Former Dodger catcher Darrin Fletcher, the slowest Montreal Expo and maybe the slowest runner in the National League, needed a triple going into his last at-bat for the cycle against the Pittsburgh Pirates. "I thought about it in the on-deck circle, but then I thought, 'What would happen if I hit one?' " he said. "I mean, Ty Cobb would have turned over in his grave until he was upside down. "For me to get a triple, an outfielder would have to fall down, break an ankle or pull a muscle.

Legend has it that the only thing Ben Hogan ever said to an opponent on the golf course was, "You're away." Former Masters champion Claude Harmon says that isn't far off. He told Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post about a Masters tournament in which he played a practice round with Hogan. At the 12th hole, Harmon scored a hole in one. The crowd went wild. Hogan said nothing, then hit his ball within a few feet of the cup. All the way to the green, Hogan was stone silent.

The new Carl Lewis met the press here Thursday, and the press was his. On the surface, Lewis' news conference at the Pan American Games was intended to give reporters a chance to question the 1984 Olympic star about his attempt at breaking the world record in the long jump Sunday. But this meeting of longtime adversaries turned out to be much more than track and field chit-chat. This was a Carl Lewis intent on mending fences, on winning friends and influencing people.

At 7 a.m. sharp, a dozen guests gather in the fitness center lobby of a Palm Desert resort, ready for the sunrise fitness walk. Group leader Bob Lemen arrives, and the eyes of a woman in her 30s grow wide, her mouth falling agape. Sporting white sneakers that match his hair, Lemen, who turns 88 in March, isn't quite the instructor you'd expect. He gets the group stretching and disarms them with his wit. "Two things you should know about walking," he says.

It might be folly to compare sprinters from different eras, particularly eras as different as the ones occupied by Jesse Owens in the '30s and Carl Lewis in the '80s and '90s. Nevertheless, here we go. Who was better, Owens or Lewis? No sprinter has been at the elite level for as long as Lewis. The fact that track and field athletes can earn sizable incomes has made it possible for him to contend for a place in his fourth Olympics (his fifth U.S.

To be black in Los Angeles before the 1950s, says Bernard Johnson, was to know Western Avenue as a two-lane blacktop barricade as impassable as the Gobi Desert and sometimes as inhospitable. For blacks, Western Avenue lacks the history of Central Avenue, where Johnson is director of the Dunbar Museum, the 1920s Art Deco hotel built exclusively for blacks turned away by white hotels.

Two-time Olympic champion Roger Kingdom, who set the world record in the men's 110-meter high hurdles last year, today was chosen winner of the 1990 Jesse Owens International Trophy Award. The award, named after the great track and field star who won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics, is presented annually to an athlete "who best personifies excellence in athletic performances and promotes sincere cooperation and understanding among peoples of all nations."

Butch Reynolds flirted with track immortality but said he wasn't even trying hard. Reynolds, a junior at Ohio State, ran the fastest 400 meters ever at sea level and the third all-time best mark with a 44.09 second effort Sunday at the fifth annual Jesse Owens Track and Field meet at Ohio Stadium. Reynolds' time is slower only to the 43.86 and 43.97 by Lee Evans and Larry James, respectively, at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, 7,000 feet above sea level.

A 14-year-old girl who told police that she was abducted from Jesse Owens Park in South-Central Los Angeles and raped at gunpoint by three men apparently made up the story to avoid punishment from her mother for staying out late, authorities said Friday. "The [girl] admitted she made up the entire incident and that it never occurred," said LAPD Det. Richard McCauley, who added that the girl may face charges of falsifying a police report.