by Dave Devine DyeStat Northwest Editor   This past winter, Douglas McKay High School senior Ryan Bailey exploded from relative anonymity onto the national scene with a 21.40 200 meter that ranked as the number one mark in the country at the time. He had never run in a national-level meet, never raced in the Oregon state meet, never even completed an entire track season. He almost didn't run track at all. This is his story.

In twenty-one seconds, everything will change.

In twenty-one seconds, Ryan Bailey’s life will be different. Twenty-one seconds from now, the senior from Douglas McKay High School in Salem, Oregon—a city not exactly renowned for national-class sprinters—will have exploded from the starting blocks at the University of Washington’s Dempsey Indoor Track and covered the distance between two lines, exactly 200 meters apart, faster than any schoolboy in the country this winter.

Tomorrow morning, the people who keep track of these sorts of things will find the result in the newspaper, or see it posted on the internet, and draw a blank. They’ll want to verify the accuracy, and dig into the archives, and type the name into search engines, and scrutinize the previous year’s state meet results, and the year before that, and they’ll come up with very little, and wonder where in the world this kid came from.

Twenty-one seconds from now, Ryan Bailey will stare blankly at the finish line scoreboard and see four digitized numbers next to his name—21.42. He’ll catch his breath and blink and take a second look, because surely, it must be a mistake. An unofficial time that will soon be corrected several tenths of a second upward. After all, this is the sixth of eleven 200 meter sections in a meet primarily populated with collegiate athletes; Ryan’s heat-winning time is fast, but not a substantial improvement on previous sections, or the sort of time that drops jaws in a competition this size. The next heat is already lined up on the track. The next five sprinters are shaking out their legs and settling into the blocks. No one’s shutting down the meet to see if the high school kid has scored a big PR.

No one, with the exception of Ryan and his coach, knows that Ryan has barely competed the last two track seasons due to a string of injuries, or that if it hadn’t been for that same coach’s persistence, he may never have come out for track in the first place. No one knows that he’s never even made it to the Oregon state meet, much less been a national contender, or that Ryan is the youngest of fifteen brothers and sisters, or that he broke his toe in his first race because he ran in borrowed spikes two sizes too small, or that he never imagined he’d have a shot at going to college until he started to understand his astonishing talent for placing one foot rapidly in front of the other.

No one knows that less than a year ago, Ryan Bailey was slumped outside a Salem bus station, rain pelting his naked back, as two men he’d never met applied pressure to a trio of stab wounds and waited for an ambulance.

No one knows any of that.

They only know what they’ve seen in the last twenty-one seconds.

* * *

It wasn’t his fault.

How was he supposed to know that the school records he was claiming he could demolish belonged to the 1986 Gatorade National High School Athlete of the Year? That the sprint standards he was dismissing weren’t simply 20-year-old McKay High marks, they’d stood for nearly that long as Oregon state records. That one of them—the 10.49 100 meter time—stands to this day. He was just a sophomore football player then, a kid with pretty good wheels talking smack to a buddy in the hallway. How was he supposed to know who Gus Envela was—a dude who graduated high school before he was even born? It was just something to do, stop by the record board and say he could beat all those marks if he wanted to. He didn’t really mean it, did he?

John Parks, McKay’s head track coach at the time, didn’t think so.

“I saw him in front of the record board when I walked into the building,” Parks says now. “It was the first time I met him, and he was talking to some kid about how he could smack down this record and that record.” Parks figured he’d stumbled across another overconfident trash-talker with no sense of history or perspective. Another kid running his mouth instead of laps around the track. “I said to him, ‘You need to come out and run.’”

Bailey, the sophomore football player, said he would—mainly to get Parks off his back—then promptly fell off the radar. Didn’t show up at practice. Never swung by to see the coach or ask about tryouts. Didn’t call or e-mail—nothing. Parks assumed that was it, the last he’d hear of Ryan Bailey the Record Breaker. He shook his head and taught his classes and went about the business of preparing the rest of his team for the upcoming season.

But there was something nagging him about that random hallway encounter.

There was something about this tall, brash sophomore that he couldn’t shake. Parks, a one-time assistant at Auburn University, knew potential when he saw it, and this kid had it in spades. If only he could get him to show up.

He didn’t see the kid again for weeks.

Then, one day during winter training, Parks spotted Bailey and a friend messing around near the edge of the track. “I got him to hop in one of the repeats,” Parks says. “I thought he was only going to run a 200, but he kept going. All the way around. He ran a 52-second 400 in street shoes and jeans. I knew then he was super talented, and it was just a matter of getting him out. I talked to him about it, and he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and then I couldn’t find him again.”

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Parks kept an eye out for the elusive sophomore, scouring the halls and eventually looking up Bailey’s academic schedule with the intention of tracking him down after class. That’s when he discovered Ryan didn’t attend many classes. “He wasn’t exactly a model student at that point,” Parks says. “Finally I saw him one day, early in the season, and said, ‘Hey Bailey, get over here.’”

It took some convincing, and a few reassuring words from Ben Kuenzi—McKay’s top sprinter that year—but eventually Bailey agreed to come out. The season was already well underway, but Ryan slipped into the workouts at full speed, learned his place in the pecking order and quickly displayed an uncanny prowess in the sprints and jumps. He even showed promise in the shot put, with very little instruction. All of which had Coach Parks thinking one thing: future decathlete. His instincts about the kid’s potential had been dead on. Bailey was surrounded by runners who could push him and he was starting to pick up the technical aspects of sprinting. And then, in the first meet of the season, Bailey crammed his size-12 feet into size-10 spikes and promptly broke a toe leading off the 4x100 relay. He gamely finished his leg, but the injury would put him out for several weeks and turn a late-season comeback into a lesson in frustration. His sophomore campaign was essentially done.

Ryan, however, was just getting started.

Football was still his first love, but here was another way to shine. Another opportunity to prove he could do more than goof around the margins and talk a big game. There was a new fire in his gut for this other sport called track and field, and it wasn’t exactly clear where that came from. Partly, it came from the persistence of a coach with an eye for talent and a willingness to go to bat for a kid he believed in. Partly, it came from a shift in Ryan’s own maturity and commitment. And partly, it emerged from the liquid serendipity of a passing hallway conversation, two people who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But isn’t that the way life goes?

In twenty-one seconds—the amount of time it takes for someone to overhear you saying you can beat all the marks on the hallway record board—everything can change.

* * *

It wasn’t his fault.

How was he supposed to know that the kid in the back of the bus was serious? That when the kid claimed he would stab his way out of a fight, he meant it? That the barrage of punches raining down on his back weren’t punches at all?

How was he supposed to know that this Tuesday morning on the #16 city bus would be different than any other? Find a seat in the back, catch up with everyone hanging out there, wait for the driver to show up, pull away and head to school. Same thing, every morning. Sure, he recognized the kid across the aisle as a student from another high school, but there were a lot of kids back there. How could he know that this one was carrying a small knife and a big chip on his shoulder? That walking away from a fight and avoiding one aren’t always the same thing?

Because that’s all Ryan Bailey was trying to do—steer clear of a fight. That’s why he got up when the jawing turned personal, when the kid suggested they get off the bus and throw down. It’s not that Bailey was afraid of the kid, or thought he couldn’t take him, it’s just that he couldn’t afford to. He’d already been suspended in the fall for a fight at school; he couldn’t allow himself to be drawn into another one here. But there was something else at play too, another motivation for ducking the brawl. As lame as it might sound in the cramped heat of a backseat argument, he was trying to do the right thing. The smart thing. He was trying to make the kind of decision that he and Coach Parks had talked about—walk away and let it pass and stay eligible for his junior track season.

Get off the bus and wait for the driver to show up, he was thinking. Everything will be cool once the driver’s here.

That’s why he stood up and turned his back on the fight, and the bus seats, and the kid, and started to make his way to the front.

It was late April. Still early in the track season, but Ryan had already run a handful of meets, including the prestigious XO Invite at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. On a typically miserable spring day—steady drizzle and bone-chilling wind—he’d finished first in the 100 and second in the 200. The times were nothing special on the rain-slick track, but the effort was there. He was starting to break out, rounding into shape and emerging as the top sprinter on McKay’s team. With Ben Kuenzi graduated, this was his year.

And then came three quick punches that weren’t punches at all.

A volley of blows to the back and shoulders just as he reached the steps to the bus door. He fumbled down the stairs and onto the sidewalk outside, which is when he heard the girl screaming through the bus window.

“Some girl was yelling that I got stabbed,” Ryan says. “I was like ‘Where?’ and she goes, ‘On your back!’ That’s when I felt something wet coming down my arm. I lifted up my shirt and there was blood everywhere.”

Three quick punches that weren’t punches at all. A punctured limb, a lacerated back, and a lung within centimeters of collapsing. One stab that burrowed through the right shoulder joint and missed a major artery, one that collided with a shoulder blade, and a third that slipped beneath the same shoulder blade and angled toward the delicate tissue of Ryan’s lung, catching on a rib.

Blood everywhere.

Ryan was too angry and shocked to feel the pain. He pursued his assailant across the Transit Mall and into the street, until a few more swipes of the knife, and a pair of transit officers, convinced him to return to the bus for medical attention.

Coach Parks fielded two urgent phone calls that morning. The first—from Ryan’s girlfriend—telling him that Ryan had been stabbed on the way to school, and the second—from Ryan’s mother—trying to make herself understood around a deluge of tears. Arriving at the hospital, he heard the same news from the doctor that everyone else was receiving: the wounds would prevent Ryan from running for at least six weeks. For the second year in a row, Ryan’s promising track season was over before it had really begun.

For the second year in a row, Ryan rushed his convalescence in an attempt to return for the Oregon state meet.

With his doctor’s blessing, he began practicing after only three weeks, cutting his recovery time in half. He competed in a single low-key meet at the end of the season, winning the long jump and 100 meter dash without serious pain, and then readied himself for the district meet. At the district meet, things were going well until Ryan took the baton on the anchor leg of the 4x100 final, unleashed his long stride, and felt something pop near his left hip.

Parks, observing from across the track, saw a sharp hitch in Ryan’s gait, turned to a fellow coach, and said, “He just got hurt again.”

At the finish line, the McKay faithful understandably mistook Ryan’s agonized tears for jubilation at having anchored his school to a district win. They didn’t realize he could barely walk.

“His muscles weren’t prepared to go as hard as he goes,” Parks says now. “He’s fine going 80 percent, but 80 percent isn’t what you want to run. Even though he could beat a lot of people running 80 percent.”

It was another season concluded on the sidelines. Another chance to shine, snatched away prematurely. Another smoldering gut-fire, extinguished before it had a chance to ignite. Here, in the aftermath of that stabbing, was the inverse of the very thing that got him on the track in the first place. Felicitous chance flipped on its head. Two people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But isn’t that also the way life goes?

In twenty-one seconds—the time it takes to maneuver from the back of a crowded city bus to the front—everything can change.

* * *

Ryan Bailey almost didn’t run track this year.

Can you blame him? Not only was there the stabbing, there was the frustration of an endless string of injuries and the fact that Parks was now coaching at a different high school. All of it took an emotional toll. Ryan gave serious consideration to wrapping up his sports career at the end of his senior football season, leaving the records on that hallway board for someone else to pursue.

But a funny thing happened on the way to athletic obscurity.

Ryan decided to run for Parks’ club team through the winter in a series of meets at the University of Washington and the University of Idaho, focusing primarily on staying healthy for an entire season. In his first 200 meter race he ran 22.10, a personal record on a fully-automated timing system. And then, two weeks later, came his breakthrough furlong at the UW Husky Classic. The unofficial 21.42 was adjusted from the scoreboard posting, but downward, not up. Ryan’s official mark was listed as 21.40, the top prep time in the nation at that point in the season.

Answering those who might have considered his 21.40 a fluke—perhaps the result of an oversized UW track or an undetected flyer out of the blocks—Ryan proceeded to reel off marks of 21.55, 21.72 and 21.71 in successive weeks. Buoyed by the success, he and Parks decided he’d race in the National Scholastic Indoor Championships at the Armory Track in New York City. It was Ryan’s first trip to the East Coast, an opportunity to compete on one of the fastest tracks in the country.

Ryan sailed through the preliminary round, only to have his troublesome left leg tighten again in the finals. This time his quadriceps seized as he emerged from the turn, leading the second of three final heats. He crumbled to the track and hobbled home last.

One more set of tears at the finish line. One more broken heart instead of a broken record. One more disappointment for a runner who has suffered more than his fair share.

But this isn’t the same Ryan Bailey who snapped his toe coming out of the blocks as a sophomore. Not the same guy who popped his hip anchoring the relay as a junior. Things are different now.

“He’s so much more mature than he was when he first came out,” Parks says. “In terms of his behavior on the track and school and everything.”

Ryan always dreamed of attending college, but he had little hope of making that dream a reality. The money wasn’t there, the grades weren’t there, the motivation wasn’t there. Twenty-one seconds can change that, too. In the months since his indoor breakthrough, he’s received letters from the University of Washington, the University of Oregon and UCLA. He’s been working on his grades, attending class and focusing on his future. He knows he’ll likely spend a year or two in junior college, but a four-year college no longer seems so far away. Certainly, the disappointment at the national meet was a setback, but it’s harder to be disconsolate when your horizons are as wide as his have become.

“Track has made all the difference,” Ryan says now. “It’s opened up all sorts of possibilities.”

* * *

Recently, Ryan had an opportunity to sit down with a McKay High alum who’s been following his career with interest. Gus Envela stopped by for a visit. Yes, that Gus Envela. The Gatorade-National-High-School-Athlete-Oregon-state-record-holder-McKay-High-School-record-holder- graduated-before-Ryan-Bailey-was-born Gus Envela. He wanted to lend his support and offer Ryan some encouragement.

When Ryan talks about that meeting, he exudes nothing but humility and respect. He understands the scope of Envela’s accomplishments and the reason they’ve lasted so long. There is little evidence of the brash sophomore or his talk of smashing hallway records. He is quiet and thoughtful and modest about the season ahead.

What’s that line from the old Rudyard Kipling poem? If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds' worth of distance run—

Turns out you can make it pretty far in twenty-one seconds, too.