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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (June 4, 2002)
Sports Editor: Adam Jude adamjude@dailyemerald.com Oregon Daily Emerald Best Bet NHL Finals: Carolina at Detroit 5 p.m., ESPN luesaay, June 4, zuoz World Cup glory takes you back to England Britannia! MW Britannia rules the waves. M^C Britains never never never JL m. shall be slaves. Ahh, for the life of an English foot ball hooligan. Drink beer. Sing songs. Root, root, root for The Boys. Give me St. George in my heart, keep me English. Give me St. George in my heart, Isay. Give me St. George in my heart, keep me English. Keep me English to my dying day. No surrender! No surrender! No surrender to the IBA. The English fans lifted their Boys in the English World Cup opener Sunday morning, filling Saitama Stadium in Japan with a sea of noise, their notes cascading down the seats and enveloping the ac tion on the field. Even through my tinny-sound ing Sanyo televi sion set, the sounds of the Eng lish transported me to another time, a time when I knew those chants by heart, a time Hockaday Two minutes for crosschecking when even this star-spangled boy bled for the St. George cross. I lived in London for two formative years, and the sporting experience was , as rich and diverse as the cultural ex perience. But not because the sporting scene was rich and diverse; in fact I found quite the opposite to be true. In England there is football, and only football. English boys and girls have two deep seeded loyalties: their club team and their national squad. King and country. Left hand and right. The English football talent is culled on the country’s play grounds, where Britain’s children play football for hours a day. As an American, I was soon “broken in” on the concrete fields of London, where I learned the subtleties of the game shooting at a brick wall behind my schoolgrounds. We knew the players on the national squad well, rooted them on in Italy 1990 (in England there is no need for the moniker “World Cup,” the place and the year suffice). Gascoigne, Lineker and Platt were our gods. Paul Gascoigne, the young, brash hero of that English squad, famously shed tears when he received a yellow card in the overtime of England’s semi final contest with Germany. He cried because it was his second yellow of the tournament, which meant he would miss the final if England won. Watching Gascoigne spill those tears had a soccer-goal-sized impact on my young sporting heart. The hero’s passion was unmatched by any of my American idols. His love for the game welled up in his heart and out of his eyes that day — and I was forever changed. There is no way to describe how Turn to Hockaday, page 8 USC sprinter wins fourth NCAA title ■Angela Williams becomes the first sprinter to ever win four NCAA championships By Adam Jude Oregon Daily Emerald The process wasn’t exactly the same, but the results were. USC’s Angela Williams became the first sprinter — regardless of gender — to win four 100 meter titles at the NCAA Championships on Saturday. Williams narrowly edged teammate Natasha May ers by 0.01 seconds to claim the trophy. “That was by a hair,” Williams said after the race. “I barely made it out of that. I had to lean and I’ve never had to lean before.” Suzy Favor of Wisconsin, who won the I, 500 from 1987 to 1990, and Seilala Sua of UCLA, who won the discus from 1997 to 2000, are the only other women to ever win four NCAA titles in the same event. “I was feeling so much pressure,” said Williams, who ran 11.29 to Mayers’ II. 30. “When I looked up and realized I had won, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.” The 5-foot-2-inch Ontario, Calif., na tive, who holds the collegiate record in the indoor 60-meter dash (7.09), has lived up to the high expectations placed upon her at age 12, when she was dubbed the next Florence Griffith-Joyner. “What Angela Williams has done for the USC program is immeasurable,” USC head coach Ron Allice said. “If you take a look at our storied history at USC, cer tainly she is the greatest female athlete to come to USC in track and field.” Williams led USC to its first NCAA team title in 2001 at Hayward Field. The Trojans finished third at NCAA meet this year in Baton Rouge, La. “When I won this event as a fresh man, I remember the huge roar from the crowd and how it felt to see and hear people cheering for me,” Williams said Saturday. “When I won it tonight, there was that same reaction from the crowd and it felt to me like my career had the proper bookends. When I won as a freshman, that was the first chapter. Now that I’ve won again, it’s another chapter that has been closed. And that makes me feel complete. “And now, it’s time to start a new book.” E-mail sports editor Adam Jude at adamjude@dailyemerald.com. USC’s Angela Williams became the first collegiate athlete to win four 100 meter titles at the NCAA Championships on Saturday. Adam Amato Emerald Freshman Katie McKeever (above) and sophomore Kirsten Riley (above right) were disappointed with failing to qualify for NCAAs this season, but will use H as motivation for the future. the WAVE of the FUTURE ■The names Katie McKeeverand Kirsten Riley will be synonymous with success for the Oregon track and field team in 2003 5y Hank Hager Oregon Daily Emerald regon track athletes Katie McKeever and Kirsten Riley could not be more different. 1 J McKeever, a freshman, was ranked 31st in the nation in the discus, and hails from Woodland, Calif. Riley, a sophomore pole vaulter, tied for 26th and is from Eugene, formerly attending South Eugene High School. However, when you look a little further, the two have a couple common denominators. Both represent the future for head coach Tom Heinonen’s squad, barely missing competi tion in the recently completed NCAA Championships in Ba ton Rouge, La., and still have a long way to go. With the NCAA typically accepting 19 to 22 athletes in each event — in 2003 that number will rise to around 25 — Turn to Track, page 6
