Sport: The Dr. Meriwether Saga

Baltimore. July 1970. Dr. Delano Meriwether, a 27-year-old hematologist, is stretched out on his bed watching a telecast of a track meet between the U.S. and France. He stares intently at the 100-meter dash, turns to his wife Myrtle and says, “Hey, I think I can beat those guys.” Myrtle nods and mutters, “Sure, honey.”

Eugene, Ore. June 1971. Meriwether, improbably garbed in gold swim trunks, a white hospital shirt and gold-and-white-striped suspenders, steps into the starting blocks for the 100-yd. dash in the A.A.U. championships. The gun sounds. Meriwether streaks for the tape with great, loping strides and wins, in the astonishing time of 9 sec. flat, a mark equaled by only one other man in history, the U.S.’s John Carlos.*

Newest Folk Hero. Neither Mitty nor Merriwell would have believed the Meriwether saga. But it is undeniably true that track’s newest folk hero never raced in competition until a year ago. Meriwether explains that his high school in Charleston, S.C., had no track team, and the football team had no use for “a guy who was 6 ft. tall and weighed 135 lbs.” At Michigan State, where he studied pre-med on a scholarship, his only brush with organized sports was a few hot games of volleyball. The first black accepted into Duke University School of Medicine, he specialized in blood diseases, and in 1969 took a job at the Baltimore Cancer Research Center. While caring for and becoming “personally involved” with young leukemia victims, he says, he desperately needed a diversion. For “exercise and entertainment,” he decided to run for fun.

Meriwether’s training methods have been unconventional, to say the least. He began by running up the 14 flights of his apartment building. Often he would run up the stairs in reverse—a sight that soon had neighbors asking who was the backward freak in the knee-length white coat? “It seemed like I’d always pass women returning home with the groceries,” he recalls. Borrowing a pair of track shoes, he started working out late at night at a nearby outdoor track. He practiced alone in the dark with no coach, no blocks and no starter’s pistol. “It’s unsafe,” he says, “to practice with a gun in Baltimore after 10 p.m.”

Back to the Lab. Since he had no stopwatch either. Meriwether had no idea how fast he was until he began competing in local meets last summer. “No one was more surprised than I was,” he says, when he ran successive 100-yd. dashes in 9.6, 9.5 and 9.4 sec. In Meriwether’s first major meet, the National Invitational in College Park, Md., in January, a field of world-class sprinters got an even bigger surprise. He won the 60-yd. dash in 6 sec. flat, just one-tenth of a second off the world record, despite a characteristically poor start. Troubled by pulled muscles, and unable to train more than two or three nights a week, Meriwether won only 2 of 12 races before his triumph in the A.A.U. 100. “I’ve never been frustrated by defeat,” he says. “If I don’t win, I know I can go back to the lab, to my patients, to television.”

Last week, after winning a U.S. Public Health Service award for co-authoring a paper entitled “The Inhibiting of DNA and RNA Synthesis by Dau-norubicin and Adriamycin in 1-1210 Mouse Leukemia,” Meriwether moved to a new job at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory in Boston. “I haven’t talked to my new employer,” he says. “He may not dig track.” A more important question is whether Meriwether digs competing in the 1972 Olympics in Munich. “First things come first,” he says. “My family and my work. But whether I do or don’t compete, I’ll always jog and enjoy it.”

* Since both clockings were “wind-aided” (run in winds that exceeded the 4.47 m.p.h. limit), they are not recognized as the official world record, which is 9.1 and is shared by Carlos and four other sprinters.