Feature Story: Obea Moore

By Erik Heinonen

From a spot atop the bleachers at the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials in Sacramento, Obea Moore watches. Leaning against the press-box scaffolding, clad in jeans and a black tank top, he watches as sprinters he used to beat with ease advance through the rounds of the 400 meters. Watches as 20-year-old Baylor University phenom Jeremy Wariner climbs to the top of the award stand after a scintillating victory. Watches as Wariner is anointed the next great American quartermiler.

Eight years ago, Obea Moore carried that mantle. As a sophomore at John Muir High School in Pasadena, California, he ran 45.14 seconds for 400, faster than any 16-year-old in world history. The following season he won the one-lap sprint at the 1996 World Junior Championships, and although his bid to become the first prep male to qualify for the Olympics since 1976 ended in the semifinals of the 1996 Trials, his destiny appeared all but assured: an Olympic gold medal.

None could have predicted what was to come — injury, uncertainty, a loss of confidence, apathy — nor that Obea Moore would disappear, then attempt to battle back, alone, in relative obscurity.

***

Though Obea Moore is rarely mentioned in track circles these days — save for the occasional say what-happened-to conversations — his name remains prominent in the record books of track and field, from age-group and Junior Olympic competition to all-time world lists.

It didn't take long for Moore's first coach, James Robertson of the LA Jets track club, to realize he had something special on his hands when Moore first turned out for practice as an 8-year-old.

"At the end of the first season he came out, I realized if he kept working the way he worked that first year, that he could virtually do anything he wanted to do," Robertson recalls. "He listened to everything and wanted to know what it took to get better. He was always asking questions, 'What do I have to do to run this time? What do I have to do to run that time?' I knew if that carried over, he could potentially do whatever he wanted to do."

Moore credits his mother mother Nanette, a high school principal, for his unusual inclination towards hard work — anathema to most young athletes. "There was discipline in the house," he says. "I had to be on time and she made sure that I had my mind right, and that I believed in myself."

By the time Moore turned 10, Robertson was so certain his prodigy would earn a spot on the US Olympic Team seven years later, he guaranteed an ESPN reporter that Moore would do just that.

The young sprinter's performances on the track certainly suggested as much. Moore set a bevy of American age-group records, and as a 13- and 14-year-old ran world bests for age in the 400, leaving those in the track community to wonder what he might accomplish as a high schooler. "[Muir head] Coach Turner introduced me," recalls Jacques Sallberg, a standout distance runner at Muir, who graduated a year before Moore entered high school. " He said, 'This Obea, he's fast,' and I'm like, 'OK, big deal, whatever,' but I heard him and other people whispering 'This kid is legit.'"

While attending Muir, Moore did indeed reach levels rarely approached by a prep athlete, but so too were the seeds of his downfall sown. "In retrospect," Robertson says, "I think the biggest mistake he made was going to Muir High School."

To those who watched Moore develop, there appeared little amiss. Through an arrangement set up by Moore's mother, Robertson continued to direct Moore's training while he ran at Muir. As a freshman, he lowered his best to 46.96 in the 400, and helped lead the school to a team title at the state championships.

The following year he exploded onto the national — and international — scene. During the scholastic season he won California state titles in the 400 and 4x400 (running a 45.4 split) and finished second in the 200. Moore then ripped off a 45.14 to win the 400 at the Pan American Junior Games in Santiago, Chile. It was yet another world-best-for-age and the fourth-fastest time ever by a high schooler.

Despite Moore's success, Robertson was having serious misgivings about the situation at Muir. "The environment wasn't conducive to him doing what he should do," Robertson says. "His teammates weren't into trying to do better and go further so he fell right into their lifestyle rather than bringing them into his lifestyle of trying to be positive and focus on track and field and the things he loved."

The problems weren't limited to track practice either. For Moore, dubbed "Snoop" by his teammates for the trademark braids he shared in common with the burgeoning LA rap star, priorities and allegiances began to shift. "He sort of became addicted to the gang life style," Robertson says. "It became more important than track and field was."

Moore dismisses the notion that he was involved in gang activity.

"As far as me, there was never any of that," he says. "I never got a record for no gangbanging or none of that, but you're associated basically. In our culture, especially over here in LA, your friends you grew up with, went to elementary, junior high school with, they gangbang. I don't really have time, because when I get out of school at three I have to catch the bus home, then at five I gotta to be a practice."

He does acknowledge, however, that he allowed himself to become caught up in the distractions of high-school life, ever-present for a standout athlete.

"When you 14, 15 and you're in the newspaper and people know about you, and you got a catchy name and you're kinda cute and the girls start liking you, the energy was getting thrown off differently," he says. " Being fascinated with the cars, and going out to the parties, dealing with the women issues it's just a lot of energy spread out and not in places where it needs to be."

Nevertheless, Moore continued to shine on the track. Although he would run no faster as a high schooler, his junior year was hardly bereft of highlights. In front of a capacity crowd of 12,000 at the State Championships in Cerritos, he sprinted to a second win at 400 meters and captured his first title in the 200. Then in the meet's final event, Moore, showered with standing ovations every time his name was mentioned, anchored Muir to victory in the 4x400 relay and a third consecutive state title with a blazing 44.8 leg.

A few weeks later he headed to the US Olympic Trials in Atlanta. There, Moore, by far the youngest entrant in the field at age 17, showed well against America's best, advancing through two preliminary rounds and finishing seventh in his semifinal. His first Trials didn't end with the Olympic berth Robertson had predicted, but Moore had proven himself America's future in the event. He confirmed it later that summer at the World Junior Championships in Sydney, where he defeated a field of top under-20 athletes in the 200 and 400, scaring his personal best in the latter with a time of 45.27. "I feel like I could have run faster than that — it was cool conditions [at World Juniors] — and that was going to lead me up to an awesome season for my senior year," Moore says. "I felt like I'd be able to go 44 low."

His rapid ascension, however, was about to grind to a halt.

***

During his senior year, Moore met with a track athlete's biggest challenge, one he had so far escaped: injury. Despite training year round and competing from early spring through late summer for more than 10 years, Moore's health was never an issue. Then, at an early season dual meet he strained his right hamstring. At first Moore though little of the injury, and with the loaded Muir sprint corps, which included future PAC-10 sprint champ Sultan McCullough, having vowed to chase national records in several relay events that spring, Moore took a short break then resumed training and racing.

"There was time during that season after March when he should have rested," Robertson says. "The team had lots of depth, could have stuck another guy in there and done just fine, but this record mindset kept Obea running when he shouldn't have. He could have rested for a month or so and been fine, but he kept pushing it."

Although deep-tissue massage allowed Moore to keep running, it did nothing — unbeknownst to him at the time — to solve his problem.

"I was basically dealing with body mechanics," Moore says. "I was an overstrider. I had extremely high knees so there was a lot of pressure on my back. When my hamstring gave I didn't work on the right body part, I had these guys working on my hamstring digging into it breaking up scar tissue. So when I go back out there and the scar tissue is broken up the muscle is weaker, so I kept pulling it because it never got strong."

For three months Moore competed through pain, but as the state championships approached, it became evident that no amount of willpower would get him through the schedule of races, and he withdrew from the meet. "Basically I was running grown-man times with a little kid's body, and my body finally gave out on me," he says. "I pulled it to where I could barely walk."

Moore found little relief away from the track. During the year, he'd made recruiting visits to Southern Cal, Baylor, and Texas, but come up short of a qualifying score on the SAT. With the cutoff for securing a mark approaching, Moore took the ACT, shooting for the 17 that USC head coach Ron Allice had told him he needed in order to be eligible. When his score came back, a jubilant Moore phoned Robertson.

"Coach, I got a 17, I passed," he said.

Then came bad news. The NCAA Initial Eligibility Clearinghouse had processed Moore's forms and determined that, in fact, he'd needed a 17.1 to pass. Moore was crushed.

"He was so devastated, it was unbelievable," Robertson says. "I don't think he ever recovered from that."

***

Instead of joining Allice's USC sprint powerhouse, an embarrassed Moore was left to enroll in junior college. He selected nearby Pasadena City College, but his mother Nanette began working to find a way out of Southern California for her son, who spent just a term at PCC before moving to Long Beach Community College. Through the mother of a teammate of Obea's at Muir, she contacted Willie Hill, head track coach at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

"I spoke to his mother about it and we started working from there to try to get him here," Hill says. "With Obea I wasn't so concerned with him running track as I was with getting him on the right road again, and helping him see he would succeed if he could get his head on straight about taking care of the whole business, not just small pieces."

Moore, who had by then withdrawn from Long Beach and was still struggling to regain his health, grudgingly agreed to head east. "There was a lot of stuff going on here," Moore says. "I wasn't really doing anything and I'm depressed, so I'm like, 'Maybe I need to go somewhere else.'"

A continent of separation, however, proved insufficient to distance Moore from the problems that had arisen in California. Unable to shake the leg injury that derailed his senior season at Muir, Moore never competed for Morehouse, spending more time in the treatment room than on the track. "The whole time he was with us he was going through injury rehabilitation," Hill says "You could tell the pain was still there when he tried to do certain things."

The injury had other ramifications. Moore, lacking motivation, struggled in school and never found his groove at the prestigious Black college, where suits and ties abound, and coming from California carried a stigma.

"When I got to Morehouse it was basically like my mind was still in California because I wanted to go to USC — I'm there but I wanted to be here (in California)," Moore says. "Stressed out and not running, which is my first love, it was kind of difficult to live in Georgia. Maybe if I was brought up in that type of environment I could understand it, but I wasn't so I really didn't fit in... I got in a couple fights and they put me out of school."

Without the time Hill and Moore might otherwise have shared at practice, in meetings, and traveling to and from competitions, the veteran coach had little opportunity to help the athlete he so desperately wanted to see succeed.

"We didn't have a chance to do a lot with Obea," Hill says. "We could try to keep him in class and help him with other little things, but we couldn't take care of him all the time. We wanted to help him grow but he had to understand his responsibility as person in the world not just as an athlete."

Hill still regrets that he couldn't have done more to prevent the young man from slipping through the cracks.

"It was hurtful," Hill said. "And the hurt was even greater because Obea is a very intelligent guy, very, very intelligent, not just one-sided. When you lose wealth like that, it not just a problem for Morehouse College, it's a loss to the world. He's not the only young man with problems, and if they don't come in contact with the right person early enough they end up in a situation doing things where society won't let them turn back. When you get on a road like that, it's like an addiction to something and you have to put in a lot of time to change it."

Moore returned to Atlanta the following year, enrolling at Life University, an NAIA school with a rich track and field tradition. Healthy for the first time since high school, he trained well during the fall and weathered a period of academic woe and two coaching changes to reach the spring season, eligible and ready to race. "I felt comfortable," Moore says. "The team was a great team, the energy was really good... I felt like Life was going to work."

After a few early season tune-ups, the team headed to California to for a meet at Pomona prior to the Mt. SAC Relays. Although Moore was excited initially by the prospect of competing close to home, as race time approached, his confidence wavered. Knowing that he would be facing a field that included more than one 45-second quartermiler didn't help matters.

"He couldn't go to the line," recalls then Life head coach Mark Spino. "If he just was even around, people had such high expectations of him, it was hard for him to start anyplace and very hard for him to have intermediary goals."

Says Moore, "I wasn't going to do that to myself. I know better. I haven't prepared for this so I'm not going to hop in this race. When you're used to competing at a top level you don't do that to yourself."

Moore never recovered from the turn-of-events in California, and in poor academic standing after spring semester, was ineligible to return to school in the fall.

After leaving Life, Moore, at the urging of his mother, gave college one more try, heading back to the south to run at Wallace State College in Hanceville, Alabama, under Stan Narewski, who once coached the now-infamous Jerome Young [stripped of his Sydney Olympic gold medal in the 4 x 400 for doping], and one of the few athletes to have beaten Moore as a prep.

"We just heard [Obea] was out there floating around," Narewski says. "Track and field was about to lose a valuable asset and someone needed to try to pick this guy up, see if they could get him going and figure out whatever it was that needed to be done. My main aim was to get the guy up and running back into a University setting, where could get a degree and get back on track as well as the track."

And, at first, it seemed as though being at the Alabama community college was the answer. Moore blended in well with the team, even took on a leadership role, and had a solid fall under Narewski. Just after Thanksgiving, Moore ran 32.1 for 300 meters, suggesting, by the spring, he would be in shape to dip under his high school personal best — perhaps far under. "We hadn't really started to roll out any speed work yet," Narewski says. "I was really pleased he was healthy, and he seemed to be motivated."

The excitement dissolved in heartbeat shortly thereafter, with a phone call from Georgia. Moore's girlfriend had passed away. Depressed and searching for answers, Moore began to drink. "I'd had three or four years of what in what my mind was failure, my girlfriend died, I don't have no answer for her death," he says. "So, let me drink."

Moore continued to practice with the team, but his heart wasn't in it. The week before Wallace State's first indoor meet, he begged out of running the open 400. "I told him, 'Just run a 600 and don't worry about it, win or lose, just get your feet wet,'" Narewski recalls. Moore agreed, but on the day of the meet, just 10 minutes before his race was to go off, he asked to scratch from the event.

"He just said 'My hamstring is bothering me, it's tweaky, I don't think I need to run,' and he didn't line up and race for us the rest of the year," Narewski says. "I think there was some sort of psychological or emotional issue there, a lack of confidence. Regardless of what evidence there was out there that he was ready to run, I don't think he felt like he was ready to go again."

Moore says he did indeed feel his hamstring grab as he warmed up on the curve, but admits that "Those pulls made some scar tissue in my mind [too]."

The foundation Moore had built at Wallace, crumbling for some time, quickly collapsed. His grades, good enough during the fall, dropped, his leadership role evaporated and Narewski couldn't persuade him to get on the track.

"Whatever was wrong was broken before he got here and I couldn't find the hot button that made him want to race," the Wallace State coach says. "I tried repeatedly to put him in a no-pressure situation. He had a great fall then all of a sudden 'My hamstring is bothering me' and the interpretation there is 'I don't want to do this anymore.'"

At the end of the school year Moore headed back to California.

"The guy from the apartment complex where he lived called us and said you need to come pick up his furniture. We went over there and he was gone, no word whatsoever," Narewski says.

Although Moore hasn't spoken directly to his former coach since, even a short stint at Wallace State was enough to leave Narewski saddened and wondering "What if?"

"As a coach, you're happy when you have a win, and lot of the wins you're happy about are when a guy gets through school and does something with his life," he says. "You see [Obea's situation] and it hits you hard because here's a guy with something that you and I don't possess, and the next 100 guys who desperately want to possess it will never possess, and he's let it get away from him. I don't think it's anybody's fault, whether it was here, or Morehouse or at Life, I just think there's some mechanism out there that nobody knows how to operate, maybe he doesn't even know, to get him going... He showed evidence of having it all, but whatever that driving force or factor is that made him good wasn't there anymore. It's a darn shame."

***

Back in the Los Angeles, Moore, seeking guidance, returned to Robertson, the man who had taken him to the top as a high schooler. But even the longtime LA Jets coach was unable to help Moore find his way. Time and again, the two would lay out a training plan and Moore would begin, in each instance showing flashes of brilliance, then disappear without a word.

"He'd come out and he would be doing great, but it was kind of like an addiction," says Robertson. "He would fall off the wagon and I wouldn't hear from him. Then six or seven months later, we started all over again, with him saying I'm ready to do this and it always ended the same way."

It wasn't so much a lack of motivation, Moore says, as the inability to scrape together enough money to train without interruption.

"It became basically survival; you don't have the resources to be there," Moore says. "I'm in and out of different houses. I'm in shoes that are four years old, and my diet is not a diet, we're sneaking in gyms, you know, when the guy turns his head. So everything is sporadic, nothing consistent, no finance, no resources to do what you dream about doing."

Weary of the cycle but unwilling to give up on Moore, Robertson kept welcoming him back until finally running out of patience last December. On Christmas Eve, Moore called Robertson and persuaded the coach to meet him for a workout. Robertson went; Moore never showed up.

When Moore contacted Robertson several weeks later, the coach gave him an ultimatum.

"I said, 'Look, this isn't working and the next time we schedule practice and you don't call, then that means the practices are over,'" Robertson says. "I had to set some parameters for him, because I was doing all this stuff, putting in a lot of time and work for five or six months at a time, and for him to keep doing that didn't make sense."

The pair tried once more, but Moore's commitment waned yet again. He and Robertson haven't spoken at length since.

***

Playing the spectator at the Olympic Trials, Moore appears at ease, joking with his neighbors and making friendly wagers — bragging rights being the stakes — with journalists sitting nearby.

"All right, who you got in this one?" he asks with a slight bob of the head and a part-goofy, part-mischievous grin.

"I'm going with Maurice Greene," says Matt Linde, a 6-4 redheaded Pennsylvanian who works for Runner's World.

"It's gonna be Shawn Crawford," Moore shoots back with a confident nod.

Greene wins, barely, with Crawford taking third a few hundredths of a second back.

Moore shrugs his shoulders and smiles.

There was a time Moore didn't blend in, couldn't blend in, at a track meet in California. During his junior year the affable sprint star drew big crowds everywhere he competed, and the moment he left the track was bombarded by fans, asking for pictures, autographs, even a lock of hair.

Despite the clamor that surrounded him as a prep and the struggles that followed, Moore's natural charm and charisma hasn't diminished. "He was just a different kid," Robertson says. "Grown-ups loved him. Kids loved him. Everybody loved him." Narewski, the Wallace State coach, agrees: "Very nice guy, very amiable individual. You could dress him accordingly, and he'd fit in anywhere."

Neither did Moore ever fall completely out of love with track and field. It may have been a love-hate relationship, as Narewski suggests, but never did the passion totally desert him. And it was that love as much as anything that brought Moore to the Olympic Trials.

"You know, it's the feeling of seeing people hitting gears, the movement, the body position, and to watch it and critique it makes you feel good, and it makes you go back to the lab and try to better yourself," he says, surveying the track during a break in the Trials action. "I love it; it's a great feeling. I wish I was out there, but you know, everything has its time."

The question remains, though, will Moore figure out how to make that time come soon enough, if at all?

When the Olympics arrive in 2008 — "Oh yeah, I plan on being in Beijing," Moore says — he will be fourth months shy of 30, by no means ancient, but well behind the curve for a sprinter attempting to break in at the highest level of competition.

"The calendar," Narewski says, "is against him right now."

***

Jacques Sallberg hadn't heard much from Moore since the sprinter graduated from Muir High School. Occasionally, they would bump into each other — at the airport, at an all-comers track meet — exchange phone numbers, but fail to reconnect. Then this spring Sallberg, ran into Moore at a meet in Westwood. In the course of their conversation, Sallberg mentioned that he'd spent time at the Mammoth Lakes altitude training camp with a group of distance runners from Team USA Southern California.

"[Obea] said he wanted to get in on some of that," Sallberg remembers. "I didn't think he'd call, but he called and he actually came up [to Mammoth] for a couple of weeks. He said he was getting serious about running and was getting back into it again."

After a training stint 8,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevadas, where he soaked up "a ton of information" from Team USA coaches Bob Larsen and Joe Vigil, and worked out with Sallberg, a former All-American steeplechaser at Division II Cal-State Los Angeles, and members of the Team USA group such as Olympic marathoner Meb Keflezighi, Moore is back in the familiar surroundings of the Los Angeles area and preparing for the upcoming indoor season.

"I've been training on my own, getting my body prepared for the goals that I want to accomplish," he says. "I'm in great shape right now. My attitude has been real good, and I'm looking forward to 2005."

Living in Culver City, he lifts weights and goes through pool workouts at a gym near Venice Beach, runs hills at a nearby park, and does his track work at Dorsey High School. Embracing a holistic approach that Hill, the Morehouse coach, believes will be so critical to a successful comeback, Moore has also added yoga to his training regimen and adopted a strict diet.

"I had get involved in some other stuff to keep my body balanced, to keep me centered," he says. "I'm basically just trying to be a complete person before I come back."

A few months into training, Moore is encouraged by his progress, and estimates he could run within a half-second of his personal best for 400.

"My speed is much better than my strength right now," he says. "I could run 45-mid [for 400] and maybe be good for a round and a half [in the Trials]. I don't have the base because I've only been training for four months."

For now, he is content to write up his own training program and work out by himself, but Moore acknowledges he will need a coach's guidance if he is to chase his goals next spring. "I've been running since I was seven years old; I know the basics of what to do," he says. "When it gets into the meat of the season, I would like to get some advice from a few legends, start working with a couple of other guys."

More pressing is the need for financial assistance. While America's top 400-meter runners earn enough from shoe contracts to train full-time, those in the next competitive tier down are often left to seek out employment to supplement small training stipends. For Moore, who's main source of income is part-time work as a personal trainer, any form of support would be welcomed.

"It's been difficult training by myself and not having any money to train on an elite level," he says. "The gym costs. Your diet costs. The gas [to travel] costs — you know that costs. It's hard to find sponsorship, especially when you haven't done nothing for three or four years, and they haven't seen you in any major meets. It's hard to get people to say, 'Here's some money.'"

Foremost among the investments Moore plans make in his training should he receive sponsorship, will be paying Robertson to become his personal coach.

"If I had that situation set up the way I wanted to, Coach James would be my only coach," Moore says. "There's only really been one coach I've had in my whole life. I will always refer back to him, because what's he's done has worked. I just wish I had the finances where I could pay him when he's out here working for me for two, three hours. But at this times, there's no money to deal with Coach James on the level I want him to deal with me."

Yet, ironically, Robertson has fielded several calls from individuals interested in offering Moore financial support. Robertson, though, can't in good conscience give any such arrangement his blessing.

"He longs for someone to sponsor him or support him, but he doesn't understand nobody is going to do that until he has stability," Robertson says. "Right now, I have people who call me from time to time telling me if it's money he needs that it wouldn't be a problem, and he probably could get all the sponsorship he ever needed — people are waiting in line to sponsor him — but I would never accept people to sponsor him or support him until I saw that it was reasonable and that he was stable."

It's the lack of stability, Robertson believes, that is holding Moore back, and although the coach doesn't doubt that Moore is sincere in his intent to return to the track, he sees no signs that Moore is willing to confront his problems, if he even truly understands them.

"I'm just hoping and praying he does get the stability, because people all across the country are still pulling for him and want him to be successful," Robertson says. "I'm at a loss what to do. But I believe inside he's a great kid, he's always been a great kid, he's always done everything that I've asked him to do on the track, but he just got caught up with the wrong people and the wrong environment. And that's a tragedy. I believe his intentions are very, very true and he really wants to [come back], but like any addict he can't get past it.

"One thing I know for sure, if he really wanted to, he could still be the greatest quartermiler in the world today — just off of talent. Every time I worked with him, what I did see was that the talent is still there. If he really worked and did what he needs to do, in my mind, there's still nobody better. All these guys I see going around the track today wouldn't have a chance of beating him if he really did what he was supposed to do."

(Posted August 16, 2004)