With OYOL on the Front

Loyola of Chicago's Tom O'Hara, 21, looks a little like the 97-lb. weakling of the Charles Atlas ads, who takes his girl friend to the beach and winds up getting sand kicked in his face. Tom actually weighs in at 130 Ibs., but his skin is the color of bleached Irish lin en, and a small-size track shirt hangs so loose on his scrawny chest that the letters on the front spell OYOL. Being skinny, though, has certain compensations--and Miler O'Hara manages to make the most of them. On his way from the airport to last week's New York Athletic Club Games, he remembered that he had not had dinner. Stopping off at a Manhattan restaurant, he ate a bowl of vegetable soup, a thick sirloin steak, and a heaping plate of mashed potatoes. Then he went out and ran the fastest indoor mile in history.

No Rabbits. "I had no idea of going for the record," O'Hara admitted afterward--and hardly anybody in Madison Square Garden suspected what was about to happen when he toed the start. Assaults on the mile record are fashioned like Marine landings: every step is plotted in advance and rehearsed for days, even weeks. Many are out-and-out team efforts, in which two or three fleet-footed (temporarily) "rabbits" are used to ensure a fast pace for the star. But O'Hara is a one-man team, and the N.Y.A.C. field was so-so at best. Nobody but O'Hara had ever run under 4 min. indoors, and North Carolina's Jim Beatty, the reigning record holder (at 3 min. 58.6 sec.), showed up only to wave at the crowd and fire the starter's gun.

For a full quarter-mile, O'Hara trailed the field--arms flapping, head wagging, hands plucking at his track togs (somebody said later) "like a shy man with broken suspenders." The steak-and-potatoes gave him a few twinges, but by the half-mile mark, he had his mind on other things. He stepped up his pace, was running second, just a stride behind John Camien of Kansas State Teachers College. Just before the three-quarter-mile mark, he slipped past Camien, and the announcer called out the time: 3 min. 1.6 sec.

"When I heard that," said O'Hara, "I knew I had a shot at the record."

All By Himself. In an instant, he turned on an incredible finishing kick. "Go! Go! Go!" screamed the fans as O'Hara raced off to battle the clock.

For three long laps, he ran all by himself--head down, arms pumping, opening up a 60-yd. lead. Then he flung himself across the finish line and staggered wearily down the track while officials huddled to compare their watches. Cheers almost drowned out the announcement of his time: 3 min. 56.6 sec.--a fantastic 2 sec. faster than Beatty's old world record. "You sonova-gun!" cried Beatty. "Tokyo, watch out for the U.S.A.!"

The last American to win the metric mile in the Olympics was Mel Sheppard in 1908. And it is still a long way from 3 min. 56.6 sec. to the outdoor-mile mark of 3 min. 54.4 sec. set by New Zealand's Peter Snell, who will also be in Tokyo come October. But there is no telling how fast O'Hara can run if he is pressed. The son of a Chicago city employee, a C student in accounting, O'Hara thinks he knows: "I believe I can go a couple of seconds faster indoors," he said last week, "and I'd be disappointed if I couldn't run at least 3 min. 54 sec. outdoors."

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