KANNAPOLIS — Melissa Morrison’s mother, Ollie Morrison, recalls that when her daughter was 8 years old, she took her to a Kannapolis doctor’s office for a tuberculosis immunization and glimpsed a future track star.
Though the immunization consisted only of an oral dose of medicine about the size of a sugar cube, Ollie Morrison said her daughter somehow became convinced that she was about to get a shot. And she hated needles.
Young Melissa led her mother and Millie Hall, then a nurse at the doctor’s office and now a member of the Kannapolis City Board of Education, on a chase through the office, Ollie Morrison confided Monday.
They caught her but not before she had proved her prowess as a speedster.
“She’s been a runner ever since,” a smiling Ollie Morrison said.
All that running culminated in September with Morrison’s standing still on a podium in Sydney, Australia, an Olympic bronze medal around her neck.
“There are not any words to explain how I felt being there and how I feel right now,” she said.
Morrison, 29, finished third in the Olympics in the 100-meter hurdles. She might have placed higher, but her leg grazed one of the hurdles mid-race and she finished .11 seconds behind the winner, Olga Shishigina of Kazakhstan.
But for Morrison, who began dreaming of running in the Olympics when she was clearing hurdles in high school, the resulting joy wasn’t diminished that much.
“My medal, to me, is a gold medal,”she said.
On Monday, at A.L. Brown High School — her first time back at her alma mater since she graduated in 1989 — Morrison answered questions coming at her as fast as those hurdles.
Students and teachers assembled in the school’s band room asked how she trains, what she eats, her plans for the future, could they see her medal and much, much more.
The 5-foot-4-inch, 115-pound, self-described “smallest hurdler in the world” took it in stride and answered all the questions — many of them more than once.
She trains hard, spending hours every day on the track. She maintains a diet (except for fried foods when she’s not training, her mama’s hot biscuits and the free food McDonald’s provided in the Olympic Village). She plans to keep running, she hopes, into the next Olympics.
And, of course, they could see her medal, as long as she was holding it.
“I don’t want to pass it back,”she said. “I’ve got to keep my hands on it.”
Freshman Tiffany Dawkins was happy just to see Morrison.
“I think it’s really cool that she made it as far as she did, coming from a small town like this,”she said.
And Morrison said she was happy to be back at the starting blocks of her career.
Morrison comes from an athletic family. Her five brothers played football, and her two sisters and her mother played basketball.
She began competing in track and field events in the seventh grade. By high school, she was competing in the 100- meter dash, the long jump and other events. She didn’t however, run the hurdles.
“Actually, I didn’t choose the hurdles; hurdles chose me,”she said. One day at practice during her sophomore year in high school, she began “messing around” on the hurdles with some friends, and her coach, Ricky Holt, noticed.
“The next week I was running hurdles” in competition, she said. “That was my first time running hurdles, and Ibeat people who had been running hurdles for two to three years. I knew right then that hurdles was my event.”
And it was, literally, her event. Morrison owned it, winning three state titles in the 100-meter hurdles and one in the triple jump while at A.L. Brown High School.
She admits that she didn’t take academics very seriously at A.L. Brown and cut down her college possibilities as a result. But at Appalachian State University, she thrived athletically and academically.
Under Coach Curtis Frye, who also coached Olympic superwoman Marion Jones, Morrison won Southern Conference championships in 1992 and 1993 in the hurdles and several other events.
At the same time, she worked toward a bachelor’s degree in psychology, which she said took precedence even over her collegiate track career.
“I graduated with a degree ... and nobody can take that away from me,” she said, telling the students that no matter how good they are at athletics, they’re not guaranteed riches or fame.
“If something happened to me tomorrow and Icouldn’t run another step, Ihave a bachelor’s of science in psychology.”
After Morrison finished college, her track career moved into high gear and she quickly established herself as one of the top hurdlers in the world. In 1996, she finished eighth in the U.S. Olympic trials and was ranked ninth in the U.S.
During the next three years, she won the U.S. outdoor championship in the 100-meter hurdles and three indoor championships in the 60-meter hurdles. She became the top-ranked 100-meter hurdler in the U.S. in 1997 and rose as high as No. 3 in the world in 1998.
in 1998, Morrison set her personal best time in the 100-meter hurdles — 12.53 seconds. Only Gail Devers has run the event faster among Americans.
It was also during the mid-1990s that Morrison experienced personal tragedy. On Christmas Eve 1996, the year she moved to Columbia, S.C., and began training at the University of South Carolina, her grandmother died.
In 1997, a niece died after a severe asthma attack. In 1998, she lost her father to heart failure and a sister to cancer. Her sister died while watching Morrison run a meet in New Orleans on television.
She considered leaving the sport, her mother, Ollie Morrison, said. “I had to keep strong for her,” she said.
Now, Morrison says she’s not finished. She trains and competes about 11 months out OF the year. She travels to Europe, where track and field is big time and its stars are, well, stars.
She doesn’t have a shoe named after her (“ ... I’m not a Marion Jones,”she said) but she does have sponsorship deals with Reebok and Oakley that, along with appearance fees for meets, provide a “comfortable living.”
A U.S. Olympic Committee program that pairs athletes with jobs may be Morrison’s ticket to a new career after she clears her final hurdle. She works part time for Home Depot in customer service now and hopes to work in human resources for the company after she retires from track.
But that won’t be for another several years. Track stars typically peak in their early 30s, Morrison said. And she plans to be running in 2004, when the Olympic Games take place in Athens, Greece.
“I think I have a lot left in me,”she said. “So I’m definitely going to go after the Olympics in 2004.”
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