Even Memory Lane Has a Finish Line for Kuller : Track: Sprinter with the smooth stride helped set a world record at USC but missed qualifying for ’68 Olympic team.

Back in the days when his long, graceful stride was keeping pace with the world’s premier sprinters, Fred Kuller had the reputation of being a quiet guy, a runner who was very consistent and would rise to the occasion in the big races.

But after he retired from competition in 1972, Kuller faded into the obscurity of normal day-to-day life, probably thinking his records and many exploits would some day be erased and forgotten.

Even today, Kuller rarely brings up his career as one of the key performers for Coach Vern Wolfe’s NCAA championship track and field teams at USC in the late 1960s.

Most of his co-workers at the private psychiatric hospital in Hawaiian Gardens, where he has quietly gone about his responsibilities as a housekeeping manager since 1981, know little if anything about his sporting past.

“Personality-wise, Fred is not the type of person who is a braggadocio at all,” said Jule Tuqua, an attorney in Orange who has known Kuller since they were teammates at Santiago High School in Garden Grove. “He’s not the type of person who would talk about it unless you ask him.”

Kuller recently was asked about his exploits, which haven’t been forgotten. It will be 25 years ago next month, in fact, that Kuller played a key role in a world track and field record that still stands and may never be broken.

On the evening of June 17, 1967, Kuller teamed with Earl McCulloch, O.J. Simpson and Lennox Miller on the Trojan 440-yard relay team to set a world record of 38.6 seconds at the NCAA finals at Brigham Young.

Kuller, who was a standout at Santiago High and Santa Ana College (now Rancho Santiago) before transferring to USC, recalls that night vividly.

“It was about nine o’clock at dusk and had been a fairly hot day,” Kuller said. “It rained almost every day we were there for about a half-hour in the afternoon. It was a soft, spongy track made of chopped-up tires.”

The USC quartet already had set a pending world record of 39.0 June 11 against an all-star team of George Anderson, Bob Beamon, Jim Kemp and John Carlos in San Diego, breaking the existing 39.6 set by Southern University in 1966. Kuller wondered if they could go any faster.

“I remember O.J. saying, ‘This is it guys, we’ve got to do it tonight. This might be the last time I run with you guys,’ ” Kuller said. “Obviously, I thought we’d do pretty good. But in the back of my mind, I wondered if we could do 39-flat. We only had three practices all week.”

Shortly after the starting gun sounded, Kuller, who ran the second leg, realized they had a shot at the mark.

“I saw Earl coming around the turn and he looked very big all by himself,” Kuller said. “I got the stick, and it felt real good. There was no sound. The only thing I could hear was my own feet hitting the surface. I kept going faster, faster, faster and was still accelerating when O.J. took off.

“He (Simpson) took off a half-step too early, but he took the pass perfectly,” Kuller recalled. “Coach Wolfe said I ran the fastest time, but I don’t know what it was. The race was over when Lennox took the final handoff. When he crossed the line, he was all alone and then came the rest of the field.”

When Kuller looked at the scoreboard, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I looked up at the time (38.6) and I thought we can’t be that fast,” Kuller said. “They must have screwed up. We knew we had won the race and that’s what counted. But it (the scoreboard clock) was right.”

The Trojan relay team easily outdistanced second-place Tennessee (40.0), anchored by Richmond Flowers Jr. When the NCAA abandoned the imperial measure for the metric system in 1975, USC’s 38.6 record was still on the books.

At the 1991 World Track and Field championships in Tokyo, the U.S. team of Andre Cason, Leroy Burrell, Dennis Mitchell and Carl Lewis set a world record of 37.50 in the closest equivalent metric race--the 400-meter relay, a course that is approximately eight feet shorter than the old quarter mile.

Except for the mile run, the International Amateur Athletic Foundation now only recognizes records set in metric races. Unless a special race is run, USC’s 440-relay record might never be broken.

Fred Kuller was a lanky, 6-foot-2, 170-pounder with a long, gliding gait that could keep up with a very fast crowd in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

“I never saw him show any fear,” Tuqua said. “He was very smooth with a very long stride. He was all acceleration and got faster and faster as he went. He wasn’t the greatest starter in the world, but after 40 or 50 yards, he was going faster all the time. It didn’t look like it was hard work at all.”

“Fred Kuller was a flier,” said Earl Engman, who coached his share of great sprinters while at Santa Ana High School. “He’s definitely one of the top five sprinters I’ve seen in Orange County. He was pure consistency. Whenever you needed him in a big race, he was there. He really flew in that relay.”

Engman, a veteran of the Orange County track scene for more than 30 years, rates Kuller with Isaac Curtis, the former Cincinnati Bengal receiver, Jackie White and two-time NCAA sprint champion Clancy Edwards, all of whom he coached at Santa Ana, and Rich Coulter of Santa Ana Valley as the top Orange County sprinters.

Kuller, who suffered from severe asthma as a boy in Kentucky, moved with his parents--Floyd and Alice--first to Arizona and then to Garden Grove in 1958, when he was 12. He enrolled as a freshman at Servite in 1960 but transferred to Santiago his sophomore year.

“I didn’t have the grades (at Servite),” Kuller explained. “I wasn’t doing too well in Latin and geometry. They said it wasn’t going to get any easier . . . so I transferred.”

At the time, Santiago was a track powerhouse under Coach Wayne Ambrose. Kuller joined forces with an already fast stable of sprinters, including Claude LeBarre and Greg Tagliaferri and hurdlers Leonard Sims and Tuqua.

“We lost our first track meet by a half-point my sophomore year, but we never lost another dual meet while I was there,” Kuller said.

Kuller began winning substantial track notoriety in 1964, his senior year.

First, the Santiago sprint relay team of Tagliaferri, Sims, Tuqua and Kuller shocked the highly favored Long Beach Poly team in the 640-yard relay in 1:08.1 at an indoor meet in the Long Beach Arena.

“No one was supposed to challenge Poly that year,” Kuller said. “They had McCulloch and Marv Motley, and we really went into the lion’s den. Fortunately, they put us on the inside lane, and that gave us the race. At that point, they couldn’t get around us, and we beat them.”

Later that spring in a dual meet against Bolsa Grande’s Randy Julian, Kuller, who had been fighting viral pneumonia, won the 100-yard dash in 9.6. The time was no fluke, Kuller proved later, when he duplicated it in the league championship finals at Buena Park High.

At the CIF Southern California finals at Cerritos College, Kuller finished second to Pasadena Muir’s Harold Busby in the 100 and 220. A week later at the State meet in the L.A. Coliseum, Kuller finished third in the 100 and second in the 220, which were both won by future Olympic gold medalist Jimmy Hines from Oakland McClymonds High School.

After graduation, Kuller spent a year at Santa Ana College running for the late John Ward’s defending State champion community college team.

At Santa Ana, he was again surrounded by outstanding talent, including 1968 Olympic high jump silver medalist Ed Caruthers, miler Sal Mendoza, half-milers Mike Eck and Gil Rangel and sprinters Herman Grimes, Eddie Preston and Louis Muniz.

Kuller lowered his 100 time to 9.4 in the conference finals, defeating Orange Coast’s Gary Blockburger. In the State finals, he set a meet record of 21.2 in the 220 as the Dons won their second consecutive championship.

“(Ward) was a great, fine man,” Kuller said. “He had different ways of handling every personality. He knew who to pat on the back and who to kick in the butt. That was a real fine team. Everyone was real supportive. It was a great experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

After making the national AAU team in San Diego and completing an exhausting tour of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the summer of 1965, Kuller transferred to USC. He was forced to pick up speed in the classroom, however, before he could get in the starting blocks on the Trojan track team.

“I was ineligible in 1966 and ran with the Los Angeles Striders,” Kuller said. “We went to Mexico City, but all and all, it was a pretty dreary year.”

At USC in 1967, Kuller was surrounded by world-class talent, including pole vaulters Bob Seagren and Paul Wilson, intermediate hurdler Geoff Vanderstock and the high-class sprinting crew.

Simpson, the former All-Pro running back for the Buffalo Bills, and McCulloch, a 13.2 110-yard high hurdler who went on to star as a receiver with the Detroit Lions, became two of the fastest players in the NFL. Miller, the Jamaican sprinter, finished second to Hines in the 100 meters in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

“I was a little leery,” Kuller said. “I was concerned whether I’d be able to do it again after the bad year I had before. The year O.J. came, the coaches had a plan to put that team together. O.J. was pretty much what he appeared to be.”

In addition to finding himself around a lot of talent, Kuller also discovered he was in the middle of a pack of card sharks.

“O.J., Dave Buck (a quarter-miler from Brea-Olinda), Dennis Carr (a half-miler from Lowell) and Vanderstock played cards incessantly. They played on the bus, in the plane, in the hotel rooms, stop for a meet and play all the way back. The main thing by the time we got to Provo was that they wanted to get Ron Copeland of UCLA and Charlie Greene, a sprinter from Nebraska who won an Olympic bronze medal in the 100 meters in 1968. They wanted to get all their money, and they got them. I think the track meet was incidental.”

In 1968, Kuller was running a consistent 9.5 in the 100 and hit 9.3 twice in Eugene, Ore., and at the University of Arizona. Although Simpson did return to rejoin Kuller, McCulloch and Miller that year, they were never able beat their 440 relay record.

“We had no motivation that year,” Kuller said. “We just didn’t have the chemistry.”

One big highlight, however, was on March 24 at the Santa Barbara Relays, where the USC foursome teamed up in the 880-yard relay for a time of 1:23.6, defeating the San Jose State team that included Tommie Smith, Lee Evans and Sam Davis. Kuller was timed at 20.7 for his leg.

“They (San Jose State) had tons of talent,” Kuller said, “but they never could get their pass down.”

It was also in 1968, however, that Kuller missed out on what probably was his best chance of making the Olympic team.

“At the conference meet in Berkeley, I pulled a muscle in the 100,” Kuller said. “We won the 440 relay, but I only finished fourth in the 100, and I thought it had put me out of contention for the Olympics. If I had known in 1968 what I knew later, I would have gone up to Lake Tahoe (for the Olympic trials) because they had everybody re-qualify. There was a lot of missed communication. We were depending on the wrong people with the wrong information.”

Kuller describes his final year at USC in 1969 as “anti-climactic.”

“I didn’t have any goals,” he said. “I ran 9.3 in the conference meet next to Lennox and finished second in the 220. But our 440-relay team (Edesel Garrison, Kuller, Ron Pharris and Miller) was disqualified in the NCAA meet in Knoxville (Tenn.) when we ran out of the lane. At that point I was ready to move on to something else.”

Kuller lived at home in Garden Grove in 1971 and ‘72, where he trained and competed with the L.A. Striders. But by the time the 1972 Olympics in Munich were arriving, he found himself in the terminal stages of track burnout.

“I was running 9.5 consistently in the 100 and my best 220 time was 20.7,” Kuller said. “I went to the AAU meet in Eugene, where the Olympic trials were going to be. I wasn’t able to run a qualifying time and didn’t go to the trials. I had been running competitively for 10 years. I was 27 years old, and I thought it was time to grow up.”

Kuller never got his degree from USC, and for the next nine years, he worked in a variety of jobs from retail to aerospace. After he was laid off by a small optical company in 1981, his old pal, Tuqua, helped him get his present job with Charter Hospital.

Now comfortable in his condominium in Orange, where he lives with his wife, Dana; a stepdaughter, Lauren, 22, and his son Ian, 13, Kuller looks back on his track career as a special gift.

“The secret of my speed, bottom line, was that it was a God-given gift,” Kuller said. “My mother said that several generations ago, there was a tall man in the family back in Kentucky who put himself through law school by running footraces for money. He must have won a lot of them, because he graduated.”

It was a natural ability that Kuller was often kidded about by his black teammates.

“I got my due respect,” Kuller said. “But I was kidded about it a lot by Preston (at Santa Ana) and by O.J. He said, ‘The first time I saw you and found out you were white, I couldn’t believe it.’ It was never a black thing versus a white thing though. I never wanted to get into that. That’s the great thing about track--you were judged by what you could do right there in front of everybody.”

Although Kuller seldom has much contact with his former teammates, the memories of his glory days still burn brightly.

“It was a lot of fun,” he says. “I had a lot of good times and met a lot of great people. I can’t remember meeting anybody who I didn’t like--even the egomaniacs. I liked the big races and liked the pressure.”

Fred Kuller would probably like to be asked about his track career more often.