Injury Can’t Keep Davis From Shining

You can’t win a national championship in football until New Year’s Day, but you sure can lose it in September. A lousy June can cost you the Triple Crown. Michael Jordan’s latest ring is just more jewelry; the 72 games the Bulls won in the regular season are history.

As often as not in sports, it’s the body of work that counts.

Aside from those times when it’s simply whether the body works.

In the long run - and that is Matt Davis’ specialty, after all - the substance of his season was going to boil down to a single afternoon, a feet-don’t-fail-me-now arrangement. This is sort of the deal in cross country, anyway. That injury intervened only narrowed the vision and upped the stakes - and made his accomplishment that much more remarkable.

Matt Davis finished fifth in Monday’s NCAA cross country championships in Tucson - the highest place for a Spokane runner since Gerry Lindgren won the race 27 years ago. Now a junior at the University of Oregon, Davis was the second American across the finish line and led the Ducks to a third-place finish, their best showing of the ‘90s. The last Duck to place higher than Davis: Alberto Salazar in 1979.

This is all terrific stuff for the resume - and doesn’t even include the asterisk: two months ago, Davis’ season was pronounced dead with a stress fracture of the right femur.

“To be honest, I had no idea how I’d hold up,” said Davis. “I knew I was going to run as hard as I could, but when you’ve only raced once all season, it’s hard to know how good your best will be.”

We should be getting the idea by now.

Davis didn’t win every race he entered when he was a student at Mead High School, but damn near - and since moving on to Oregon he’d been 31st and 15th in his first two NCAA cross country meets. When he came up limping in September, it seemed the timetable would be pushed back a year.

But Davis had his own plans, and his own reasons.

“One, I wanted to run with Karl Keska - this was his fifth year and I wanted to have one last season with him,” said Davis said. “And secondly, I just wanted to run with this team. There’s a chemistry here that’s hard to describe, but these guys never let you down and I didn’t want to let them down.”

Those guys include three former Mead teammates Rob Aubrey, Greg James and Davis’ younger brother Micah. Only James ran in Tucson - he was 57th - as the other two fell victim to what Davis called “sort of a Catch-22.

“We have nine guys on the team, but only seven can run and we switched guys in and out of different meets. When it came down to the district meet, Rob and Micah sat out - and every guy who ran wound up being all-district. It wasn’t like coach (Bill) Dellinger could pull any guys out who hadn’t run well and run the others at nationals. What he did do was fly them down for the race anyway. They warmed up with us and helped us and talked to us, and they’re as much a part of it as anyone. But it was a pretty stressful situation.”

For Davis, the stress was a little different. After restricting his workouts to the pool for three weeks, he tried running on his injured leg too soon and had to take another 10 days off before resuming training in November. Then he had to pass muster for Dellinger in two workouts just before districts to get his chance.

“If they hadn’t gone to Bill’s design,” Davis said, “I would have redshirted.”

Didn’t that seem like the prudent option anyway?

“You have to take the risk,” he insisted. “Really, the only race that matters is the NCAA meet. And it was worth it. I was 10 spots better than I was last year after missing basically the whole season. It gives me a lot of inspiration to train hard this winter. I really feel like I can run with those guys now.”

In Tucson, he mostly ran them down. He brought up the rear of the top 25 after two miles of the 10,000-meter race, moved up into the first 10 two miles later and then “started to fade a little bit.

“I just thought, ‘You’ve got to have faith - you can finish this race,”’ he said, “and suddenly those guys I thought I was going to lose to, I wound up passing them and a few more. You tend to forget that other guys may be feeling as bad as you are.”

The ones he couldn’t catch were three Kenyans - the winner, Godfrey Siamusiye of Arkansas, and Jonah Kiptarus and Cleophas Boor of Nebraska - and Stanford’s Greg Jimmerson. Among those he did was Pac-10 champ Mebrahtom Keflezighi of UCLA.

His motivation, however, wasn’t taking aim at the big names.

“Really, it meant so much to have Rob and Micah out there yelling,” Davis said. “I could catch onto that and push even harder. And Greg, a mile runner out there going 10,000 meters as hard as he could, means a lot to me. It makes me dig in that much deeper. I don’t think you can put a worth on having friends like that with you.”

Whether it’s for one race, or for the body of work. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review