Team Granville : Ever Since He Was in Grade School, Michael Granville and His Father and Coach, Michael Sr., Have Charted a Careful, If Unorthodox, Course For the Budding Track Superstar. Will the Next Stop Be the '96 Olympics in Atlanta?

By KIRBY LEE

June 11, 1995 12 AM PT

The small grass field at Bell Gardens Elementary School is a ragged patchwork of dried turf and loose dirt hiding gopher holes, rocks and treacherous dips--hardly an ideal training site for an athlete of any level, let alone the nation’s top high school 800-meter runner.

It is here, though, that Michael Granville II trains, battling exhaust fumes from the nearby 710 Freeway, fending off dogs and weaving his way around an occasional soccer or baseball player in his path. Perhaps the training grounds for the 1996 U.S. Olympic team will be more glamorous.

“The Olympics are on my mind,” the Bell Gardens High junior said matter-of-factly. “In 1988, I remember watching the Olympics. In 1992, I really started getting into it. In the upcoming Olympics, I’m getting excited because I’m thinking I have a shot at this.”

Bold words for a 17-year-old, but Granville has the credentials to back them up, with a progression of performances since age 10 that seem to point inevitably toward star status.

Under the strict guidance of his father, the only coach he has ever had, Granville has broken a succession of state and national age-group and high school records to become the third-fastest high school 800 runner of all time after a clocking of 1 minute 47.96 seconds in April.

He has the physique of an adult--6-feet, 1-inch tall and 180 pounds of smoothly tapered muscle--but Granville will be the lone high school athlete in the men’s 800 meters in this week’s United States Track and Field national championships in Sacramento. He will compete with the country’s top collegians and athletes more than 10 years his senior for three places on the U.S. World Championship team.

“I’m not preparing myself for what they’ve been doing,” Granville said calmly. “Give them credit and God bless them, but this is me running. We’re right on pace to where I am supposed to be.”

If he can lower his times sufficiently over the next year, Granville will join a long line of track stars from central Los Angeles who have gained fame and even fortune from the Olympic Games.

They include Jordan High’s Florence Griffith-Joyner and Kevin Young, world record-holders in the women’s 100 and 200 meters and men’s 400-meter intermediate hurdles; Valerie Brisco-Hooks, the 1984 triple sprint gold medalist out of Locke High; and Johnny Gray of Crenshaw High, the American record-holder and 1992 bronze medalist in the 800.

Since he was age 11, when his father, Michael Granville Sr., first began entering him in youth races, Michael has recorded times that signaled a promising future.

As an eighth-grader at Bell Gardens Junior High, where he was the school’s valedictorian, Granville timed 48.79 in the 400 and ran 1:56.3 for 800 meters at age 14. He also won the events in the 13-14 age division in the Junior Olympics.

“The times he ran in junior high would be excellent for a senior in high school,” said Doug Speck, meet director of the Foot Locker/Arcadia Invitational and a senior editor for Track & Field News. “The times he is running now are extraordinary.”

Nearly everything else about the teen-age track star is, too.

He’s a top-notch scholar with an A-plus average; an aspiring architect whose artwork has rated public display; an exceptional all-around athlete who could walk onto his school’s football, basketball or baseball teams were it not for his devotion to track--and to the wishes of his father.

“I’ve never worked with anyone other than my dad,” Granville said. “That’s the right connection. We understand each other and anybody else wouldn’t fit in this clique we have here. They can’t come between us. It’s just me and him.”

Parents coaching their sons or daughters is fairly common at the high school level, rare at the college level. Granville Sr., however, adamantly insists on sticking with his son as a coach at whatever college takes him.

More than 50 colleges, including track superpowers UCLA, USC, Arkansas, Houston and Georgia, have expressed interest in Granville. Wherever Granville chooses to go, the two vow to remain side by side.

“When you get him, you get me,” Granville Sr. said. “When you get me, you get him. Together, you get records. It’s not like at a certain age you can have him. The day Mike comes to me and says: ‘Dad, that’s it,’ I’ll say, ‘OK.’

“We’re black and poor--that means financial aid,” he said. “He can work his way through college. He can go to college without track.”

Bell Gardens Coach Fidel Elizarrez had no intentions of tampering with the father-son combination when Granville came to Bell Gardens High, allowing him to practice alone and apart from the high school team, though he does run for the team in almost all its dual meets and scores points in CIF competition for the Lancers.

“A lot of people feel that parents shouldn’t be coaching kids,” Elizarrez said. “I never let my ego get in the way and always felt I should do what’s best for the kids. His father has done a fine job from the beginning. They’re like brothers, and very close. Why fix something that isn’t broken?”

A gifted athlete in his own right, the elder Granville was the CIF Southern Section 3-A Division champion in the 440-yard dash in 1975 for Lynwood High. He went on to compete at Cal State Northridge, where he cleared 7 feet in the high jump and 50-feet- 1/2-inch in the triple jump. He also ran 45.6 and 1:48.7 for 440 and 880 yards before his career was shortened by a back injury.

Granville Sr., 38, dropped out of college and worked as an aerospace assembler to support his wife, De Laura, and Michael II, but said he is unable to work because of lingering back problems. The family depends on welfare. Michael’s mother stays at home caring for Michael and the rest of the family: daughters Sha Laura, 15, Micheal, 12, and Sha Reese, 6, and son Mario Max, 4.

Family portraits and photos of Michael in competition line the living room walls of the Granvilles’ three-bedroom apartment, about a mile away from Bell Gardens High.

From their modest dwelling, the two Michaels set out after school four days a week to the nearby field.

They make the short walk up Quinn Street to the corner at Jaboneria Road, hop a 3-foot chain-link fence and cross the school’s empty playground, making their way past a sandbox and a handball court with peeling paint, through the basketball courts designed to keep after-school loiterers away.

“If you want to play basketball, you’d better bring your own rim,” the elder Granville warns. “They take them down after school to keep gangs from hanging out. We keep a rim at home. The school knows us and we have special permission to play.”

The workout begins. Father and son start the two-lap warm-up, a steady pace past the monkey rings and between the trees and picnic benches, with a left turn at the barbed-wire fence bordering a junkyard and the adjacent 710 Freeway.

The teen-ager scoops up small stones along the way, aiming for pigeons and crows scratching for food in the center of the field. Granville Sr. jogs alongside with a 5-foot pipe to ward off the dogs from a neighboring housing complex that often roam onto the field.

“We don’t like staying too late because that’s when they turn all the dogs loose,” the elder Granville shouted above the din of rush-hour traffic. “I try to get to the dogs before they get to Mike so they don’t disrupt him running. If I don’t, he has to handle them himself.”

The two recall an incident the previous week when Granville Sr. was too far away to stop a charging pit bull before he reached his son.

“I kicked him as hard as I could. Right in the jaw,” Granville said, pointing to his chin. “He ran off whimpering. I don’t think that dog will be coming back any time soon.”

The pair laughed and exchanged high-fives as they approached the end of the fence. The father pointed to a small hole in the chain-link, a few feet away from a call box on the freeway shoulder.

“You do not want to be here at night,” he said. “People calling for help get robbed all the time. The thieves slip through the fence and it’s impossible to catch them.”

Another left at a brick wall, which separates a housing complex from the field, then a short curve around the outhouse and a baseball backstop and one lap is complete.

The elder Granville stops as his son continues running. After the warm-up, there’s a couple of wind sprints. Then it’s chin-ups or dips on the parallel bars, push-ups or a game of basketball.

Often it’s back to the family garage, where Granville works out on a punching bag. His father said he rarely has his son work out on the track and emphasizes alternative activities to prevent burnout. On rest days, father and son spend the afternoon challenging one another on Nintendo games.

The teen-ager’s conditioning program starkly contrasts the training of most national-class middle-distance runners, who run six to seven days a week, logging 80 to 100 miles, including two to three days of speed work on the track.

Even so, Granville’s physical abilities seem limitless.

Granville, who has a vertical leap of 42 inches, can reverse-dunk a basketball with two hands from a standing position. He has also won the Pepsi Hot-Shot competition, an annual basketball shooting contest in Cudahy, for each of the past five years. At age 12, Granville said his fastball was timed at 82 m.p.h.

He is content, for the time being, to concentrate solely on track.

Granville’s immediate goal is to run 1:46 this year, and his long-range plans are to lower his mark to 1:44 in the two-lap race by the time the U.S Olympic Trials in Atlanta roll around next June. If he is successful, it would make Granville a legitimate contender for one of three berths on the U.S. Olympic team.

In the 1984 and 1992 U.S. Olympic Trials, it took times of 1:43.97 and 1:43:92 to make the U.S. team. In 1988, a mark of 1:44.91 was good enough.

In terms of competition, Granville’s burden has so far been light. He is seldom pushed in high school meets--his lone loss in the 800 over the past two years was by seven-hundredths of a second in the CIF State meet June 3, on a day Granville says he was hindered by asthma. The lack of competition raises one of the few question marks about his prospects: Can he compete against the best?

The first test was to have come in the Sunkist Invitational indoor competition in February in a 500-yard race. Granville was invited to test himself against the veterans after bettering the open winner’s time as a sophomore. Granville, however, fell at the start and finished last in the field of five.

Granville is unfazed by his rude introduction to national- and world-class competition, and he eagerly awaits his second chance in Sacramento. Granville also has intentions of competing on the European track circuit this summer.

“Everything up to this point this year has really been just workouts,” Granville said. “With the exception of the few, big-name meets, I haven’t really pushed myself. [Sacramento] is where my season begins. This is where I start, and God willing, I plan to do more in Europe.”

Today, Bell Gardens. . . . This summer, Europe.

Next year, Atlanta?

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Foot Specialist

Michael Granville will be the lone high school athlete in the men’s 800 meters in this week’s United States Track and Field national championships in Sacramento. He will compete with the country’s top collegians and athletes more than 10 years his senior for three places on the U.S. World Championship team.

* 800 Benchmarks

U.S. High School Record: George Kersh, 1:46.58, Sacramento, June 13, 1987

American Record: Johnny Gray, 1:42.60, Koblenz, Austria, Aug. 28, 1985

World Record: Sebastian Coe, 1:41.73, Florence, Italy, June 12, 1981

* Better With Age

Michael Granville’s progression in the 800 meters:

Age 14: 1:56.3, Athletics Congress Youth championships, Auburn, July 3, 1992

Age 15: 1:51.03, National Scholastics championships, Westwood, June 12, 1993

Age 16: 1:48.98, Southern Section Division I finals, Long Beach, May 14, 1994

Age 17: 1:47.96, Foot Locker / Arcadia Invitational, April 8, 1995

* Running Roughshod Over Records

Date: May 28, 1993