The championship photograph comes later. First there is a town called Sandy Point, on the island of St. Kitts, and a boy in a family of three brothers and four sisters. The father is a sharecropper. The farm sits in the foothills. Crops. Animals. The kind of subsistence that does not wait for a child to be old enough.
He worked while he went to school. He started as early as two or three in the morning. He was a victim of child labor. He suffered abuse at home and in the classroom. None of this is metaphor. It is the opening of Beyond Ambition: The Color of Black, and it is why the later medals refuse to glitter in isolation.
Local school sport became a way through. Representing St. Kitts in athletics. High school graduation in 1973. Then a surprising turn that the memoir insists we notice: before America, before Idaho, he stood in front of Grade 4 at Vanduyn Public School and taught.
August 1976. Departure for the United States. Idaho State University. No coach had recruited him. He walked on anyway. Four individual Big Sky championships in the 800m and 1000m would follow, along with a Bachelor of Science in Biology, pre-med, and a minor in Physical Education.
The distance between Sandy Point and Pocatello is not only geography. It is the distance a young person travels when the world has already decided what his mornings are for. The book is the map of that distance. It does not pretend the map was fair. It only proves it can still be crossed.