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His wife always took over the night before a race. Brown-eyed Shirley Ann Patton, with whom Mel "started going steady" in the seventh grade, would invite friends over, instructing them in advance to talk about everything but track. When Mel went to bed, around midnight, he slept quietly. Next morning, Shirley Ann found odd jobs for him to do, and kept a string of small talk going to stall off thoughts of the race until about 11 o'clock. Then, as they parked two-year-old Susan with grandma and got ready to leave, inside Mel Patton the current would snap on.
Without Malarkey. His stomach would begin to churn and his brown eyes got watery and bloodshot. Normally calm and pleasant, he changed into a grouch. Says Mel: "I feel weak—weak as a kitten —when I walk on the field. I feel too tired to warm up, and I don't warm up much. Not as much as other fellows." U.S.C. Coach Dean Cromwell (now head coach of the Olympic track team), who has a reputation for inspiring his athletes with well-chosen malarkey, never goes near
Patton before a race. The split second the gun goes off, all this pent-up emotion explodes.
After the race, Patton usually goes quietly under the stands and gets sick. Says he: "It's gotten to be a damn bad habit."
Dusty Victory. Mel Patton was born in Los Angeles, and like most great runners, had no speedsters in his family. His father, a power company lineman, was stocky and unstreamlined.
At eight, Mel was hit by a truck outside his home, and his left leg was shattered one inch below the hip. His running career almost ended before it started. "I was fouled up for six months," he says. "I still remember lying on that hospital bed with my leg jacked up in the air by ropes and pulleys. I had to lie a little about no broken bones when I went into the Navy."
At a school May Day celebration, when he was twelve, he outsped a dozen other kids across a dusty field, and discovered his talent. It wasn't until he went to University High that Mel met the coach who knew what to do about it.
Quiet, dark-haired Jim Pursell, a onetime relay runner at U.S.C., was too wise to monkey with Patton's basic style of running. After one look at him, he decided that what the kid needed most was time to develop. Pursell kept him on the "B" squad as long as he dared (until Mel ran a 10.2 against Manual Arts High one day). Then the coach began to rub OR some polish.
The Float. At University High field, he taught Patton how to "float." The idea was, to explode off the blocks and drive like mad for 50 yards. Then he was to shift gears, i.e., relax while maintaining maximum speed (the way Patton describes it: "You just settle down and go along for the ride").
At first, Mel was carrying his arms too low. But the coach cautioned him against raising them too high; that would tighten up the shoulders and cut down his relaxing. Quick to catch on, Mel became a "floater" in two semesters. In his second year he sliced his time down to 9.9 seconds. The-next year it was 9.8. He didn't lose a race in high school.