Baker’s McTear ties world record at Showalter Field
Winter Park’s Showalter Field has been the scene of many a high school highlight over the years.
But the performance that added national attention to Showalter’s storied history was a world-record-tying 100-yard dash by a high school junior, Houston McTear, on this day in 1975.
McTear, a product of backwoods poverty and the tiny high school of Baker in Florida’s Panhandle, came out of nowhere to run the 100 in a stunning time of 9.0 seconds in a Class 2A preliminary race seen by a small crowd of only 300 or so on a sun-baked late Friday afternoon.
The performance came almost two hours before the finals. Thus, there was sparse attendance at that point of the Class 1A and 2A competitions.
McTear went on to grace the cover of Sport Illustrated in 1978 and briefly hold the title of world’s fastest man. But before his fabled run at Showalter he wasn’t widely regarded as even Florida’s fastest high school sprinter in a banner year for track and field.
He had won the 2A classification 100- and 220-yard dashes as a freshman and sophomore, including a 9.7 time in the 100 as a ninth grader. That made McTear a threat to break the FHSAA state meet record of 9.6.
But aficionados were mostly excited about the stars in Saturday’s 4A competition. That included Winter Park legend Mike Roberson, who set a national high school record with a 13.2 time to win the 120-yard high hurdles and won the 220 in 21.1. Daytona Beach Mainland’s James Brown long-jumped 24 feet, 3 1⁄4 inches — then No. 2 in state meet history — and clocked a 9.2 time to top Roberson (9.4) in the 100.
McTear, who was 18, stole the show before those guys ever got to the track.
“It was a shock to have anybody run that fast,” says Bill Buchalter, an esteemed former Orlando Sentinel sports reporter who was the state’s track and field authority for decades. “To have this kid from a small school, with no real formal training, do what he did was pretty incredible.”
From the Showalter press box, Buchalter called the LA Times shortly after McTear blazed across the finish line to report the record. It tied a standard set a year earlier by Ivory Crockett, a U.S. champion who broke a record of 9.1 set in 1963 by “Bullet” Bob
Hayes, who left track to become a Pro Football Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys.
Buchalter’s message was met with skepticism in an era when officials were still manually timing many races with handheld stopwatches.
“They said, ‘That could not have happened,’ ” Buchalter says of the conversation.
That made it a surprise when shortly after his call that a story, based on Buchalter’s feed, popped up on wire services. It spread nationally nearly as quickly as McTear covered the length of a football field.
At least one Orlando TV news station reported the world-record match on its 6 o’clock news show. That helped turn the championship session, which normally would have played second fiddle to Saturday’s meet of larger schools, into a spectacle.
“I stood up on the top row at Showalter and looked out into the parking lot, and all you could see was car after car coming down to Cady Way,” Buchalter says.
The finals began at 7 p.m., with the 100 coming early in the night session. A packed house watched McTear settle back into the starting blocks and then easily win the final. But his time of 9.3 was a letdown even as one of the best high school performances seen in Florida before the 100-yard race was replaced in favor of the longer 100-meter international standard in 1986.
“[A] 9.3 is really fast, but the crowd was disappointed, of course,” Buchalter says. “I guess they thought they were going to see him break the world record again. That doesn’t happen every day.”
McTear returned to Showalter as a senior in 1976 and won the 100 in what seemed a pedestrian 10.0 on a weekend that saw future NFL star Cris Collinsworth of Titusville Astronaut win the 3A title, also with a 10.0 time.
A little over a month later, McTear smashed another high school record. He ran an electronically clocked time of 10.16 for 100 meters, which is 109.4 yards, for second place at the U.S. Olympic Trials to qualify for the Olympics. A leg injury prevented him from competing for the U.S. in Montreal.
Four years later, after turning pro as a member of the Muhammad Ali Track Club, McTear broke the world record for the 60-meter dash. He was in position to make another run at the Olympics. But that dream died when President Jimmy Carter ordered the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow.
McTear’s life sadly spiraled downward with drug addiction, homelessness and death from lung cancer at 58 in 2015.