Tuesday, July 27, 2004 | 9:14 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
He's such a nice guy that if you asked Mike Conley to jump, he'd probably ask "how high?"
Or at least "how far?"
That's something Conley used to specialize in as a track and field star, which he was long before he became coach of the Spiece Indy Heat, one of the top A.A.U. boys basketball teams in the land that broke down Team Breakdown from Florida 86-68 in the Big Time Tournament championship game at Foothill High on Monday.
In 1984, Conley won a silver medal in the triple jump at the Summer Games in Los Angeles and eight years later, brought home the gold with a record-setting performance in Barcelona.
As head of USA Track and Field's elite athlete programs -- i.e., the Olympic and international teams -- Conley constantly finds himself defending the sport amid allegations of performance-enhancing drug use by some of its biggest stars.
"This is a pivotal time in our sport," said Conley, who leaves for Athens next week. "My hope is that our sport cleans itself up and we move forward. And that the world is assured that track and field is a clean sport."
Conley said that always has been the goal, even if it only has come to the foreground recently amid claims that Marion Jones was injecting growth hormones when she won five medals at the 2000 Games in Sydney.
"The difference between now and back then (when he was competing) is now you have the media thing," Conley said. "I'm in charge of our anti-doping program and if you look at the numbers, our athletes are tested 3,000-something times per year. And of those 3,000 tests, on average, we'll get something like .2 percent (that are tainted). Other sports get a way bigger percentage than that."
Then, says Conley, there is "this BALCO thing."
BALCO is an acronym for Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a firm that prescribed nutritional supplements for high-profile athletes such as baseball sluggers Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, and is subject of a federal grand jury investigation for distribution of illegal drugs and supplements.
"This BALCO thing is something separate that needs to be cleaned up. That's something that has just happened," Conley said.
"Before the BALCO thing ... there was no basis for the media attention it (steroid use) got. This BALCO thing needs to wake the world up, that this is just not a track problem. This is an American problem."
If there's a quick fix, Conley said he believes track and field discovered it more than a decade ago, when it first started testing its athletes.
"We're there," he said. "The biggest thing is that the federal government is involved and we are our own anti-doping agency, separate from any sporting group, and we are getting after it.
"If this makes sense to you, we were the only sport testing back then, and we were the only country testing out of competition. And we were catching people."
Just as baseball may be now.
"That point is only coming to a head now with baseball," Conley said. "It wasn't even an issue before. But now that they're testing, they've found there is a problem. But it's the same problem that has always been there."
Conley said the reason track and field has taken a pounding in the court of public opinion is because it was the only sport to crack down on steroid users in the first place with a pro-active anti-doping program.
"But you get killed because you try to do something about it," he said. "That's what we're going through now. We've done something about it and we got crucified for a few years and now we're making headway. Hopefully, we can move forward from here."
Around the horn
In a variation of the old TV game show "What's My Line," college coaches at the Big Time high school basketball tournament are asked to enter and sign-in please at tournament headquarters at Foothill High. Although most of the marquee coaches don't bother with putting their John Henry on the giant registration card covering the Foothill trophy case, some, such as Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and Arizona's Lute Olson, still do. Wake Forest's Skip Prosser, Wisconsin's Bo Ryan, Stanford's Trent Johnson, Northwestern's Bill Carmody, Georgetown's John Thompson III, UNLV's Lon Kruger and Montana's Larry Krystkowiak, the former Milwaukee Buck, were among the others who autographed the sign-in sheet this year. As did Happy Dobbs of Oberlin College, proving you don't have to be big time to attend the B ig Time. But I was amazed to see the name of Cazzie Russell, one of my forgotten boyhood idols, on the list. The former Chicago schoolboy legend and Michigan star is now coaching at Savannah College of Art & Design, a junior college in Georgia. ...
If the Big Time organizers ever grow weary of running a massive high school basketball tournament, they could always get a job with the airlines given their outstanding record for leaving the gate on time. Despite a schedule that had 835 games at 24 sites over five days, and a power failure at Liberty High School, the games went off as scheduled. Even more impressive is that by trimming halftime, timeouts and the pregame warm-up to the bare minimum, the game I watched on Sunday was played in just one hour, two minutes. It was like watching Bob Gibson pitch, only without the chin music. "But we've got a little work to do," said Dominic Clark, who, like just about everyone associated with the Big Time, is highly efficient in his role as tournament media coordinator. "Last year, the championship game was scheduled for 6:20 and it tipped at 6:22. " ...
Las Vegas 51s president Don Logan said the $30 million "Triple-A" stadium to be built in Sparks will be a home run for whichever PCL team decides to relocate there. One of the chief candidates is Tucson, which plays in a stadium south of town, a good way from its population base. But Logan would hate to lose Tucson, with its ideal location and size, as a PCL market. ... If you're wondering why the 51s insist on playing on Sunday afternoons during the crazy-hot days of summer, it's because the hours of 4-7 p.m., when the team would arrive at Cashman Field for batting practice before playing a night game, are the hottest hours of the day. Logan said 51s players and coaches to a man would rather roast early on Sunday and have the rest of the day to spend with their families. Besides, it's not as if moving to Sunday night would result in a noticeable di fference in crowd size. ...
In what had been something of a secret, announcer Paul Page indicated during Sunday's Indy Racing League event at Milwaukee that Las Vegan Perry Rogers is now serving as two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Helio Castroneves' agent. Absolutely true, said a spokesperson at Rogers' office, who confirmed that Rogers, Andre Agassi's boyhood pal, has been representing Castroneves for about a year and half. You also might have heard of Rogers' other sports clients -- Agassi and that big guy who will dunking the ball all over South Beach next winter. "Perry negotiated the whole deal," the spokesperson said about the blockbuster trade that sent Shaquille O'Neal from Los Angeles to Miami. ... Noted college football prognosticator Phil Steele has placed UNLV No. 17 on his list of most improved teams for 2004. ... And finally, in that the Red Sox and Yankees have finally starting punching each other, I guess this really is July. Covering all these high school tournaments and professional summer basketball leagues and interviewing Mountain West football coaches at Lake Las Vegas in the dead of summer sure can confuse a guy.
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