WSU's Brash Chaplin Quits As Final Protest

For more than 20 years, he gave Washington State University its most dominant athletic team.

John Chaplin recruited in Kenya and Kennewick with equal abandon. He won 202 dual track-and-field meets and lost 15. He was 22-1 against Washington. He won the WSU's only national team title.

"But you know what?" Chaplin said this week. "In all that time, not one athletic director at Washington State - not one - ever came into my office and asked, `John, is there anything I can do for you?'

"You have to be a blind not to see there are going to be fewer schools with track teams in the future. I don't want to stick around and see if my school is one of them."

Chaplin, 57, quit as coach after this season. The final meet is this weekend in Pullman - the Pac-10 championships - and then the NCAAs next month in Boise, Idaho.

"I love the school," said Chaplin, who has been reassigned to work for the university provost, "but I don't like the direction I see track and field going. I also don't have any faith in our athletic department. I don't want to get the bomb dropped on me like Rex Davis did. He's 62 years old and finds out he has no tennis team. I don't want that."

Chaplin contends the decision to quit is his. He denies reports he was asked to step aside by the university in an effort to mitigate NCAA sanctions involving both the WSU track and baseball teams.

"I was guilty of stupidity in not checking the NCAA rules," Chaplin said, "but I was never guilty of complicity. Do you think I'd have a job with the provost if I had?"

Sally Savage, executive assistant and counsel to WSU president Sam Smith, told the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune, "His resignation was voluntary."

Smart, bold and brash, Chaplin succeeded at WSU despite the school's rural location. He out-thought and out-worked his competition. In 23 years, his team always finished in the top half of the teams at the conference meet. No school had a winning record in dual competition against him.

Clearly, he was a coach ahead of his time.

The flags of 31 nations wave outside WSU's track stadium.

"Diversity, it's politically correct now," he said. "But back then African distance runners . . . were not the thing of the day."

Chaplin knew no limits. He recruited and helped develop world-record-holders Henry Rono and Samson Kimombwa, and NCAA champions John Ngeno, Joshua Kimeto, Peter Koech, Julius Korir, Richard Tuwei, and Samuel Kibiri.

Rather than be defensive, he took the offensive, putting up the flags of the home countries of his athletes. In Eugene, Ore., where his distance runners beat Ducks and broke hearts, Chaplin capitalized on the criticism of his international recruiting by wearing a safari hat to meets.

Huge crowds booed his entry into the stadium.

In 1978, he ordered Rono to slow down, so he wouldn't break the world record in the steeplechase "because the Oregon fans didn't deserve to see it happen." A few weeks later, Rono broke the record before a few hundred fans in Seattle.

"I was building the gate," Chaplin said later. "The fans came back to yell at me, but they came back. We had some great crowds in Eugene and we always got half the money from the gate."

Perhaps Dick Young, former WSU athletic director, best characterized Chaplin.

"I'd say he is borderline genius who isn't very challenged by his position as track coach," Young said.

Chaplin said the time had come to quit coaching.

"I'm afraid I don't have the same old fire in my belly," he said. "Socks, jocks and towels aren't all there is to life."

Chaplin knows about life. And the loss of it. His son, James, was killed in a 1991 automobile accident. A few years before, the home he and his wife, Linda, built burned down.

"I'm ready to do something else," he said. "And besides, I'll still have plenty of track."

Chaplin is a technical officer for the International Amateur Athletic Federation and chairman of the International Competition Committee for USA track and field.

Scholarships for men's track have dwindled to 12, and under NCAA sanctions, WSU has only nine.

"I can live with that," he said, "but now they're telling me half my money has to be spent in-state. I don't think the time is far away that they'll limit the number of men on a track team, whether they have a scholarship or not. It will be in the name of gender equity."

The man who was ahead of his time, is suddenly past it. But then life goes around, especially when you're a track coach.