Johnny Morriss

Sport: Track and Field

Induction Year: 1989

University: UL-Lafayette

Induction Year: 1989

They don’t make hurdles – or hurdlers – like they did before World War II.

Six of the 15 track and field athletes in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame were world class hurdlers, including two of the five members of Bernie Moore’s LSU team that won the 1933 National Collegiate Athletic Association championship. But modern day hurdlers such as Rodney Milburn and Willie Davenport should be thankful that they didn’t compete in the good old days.

Hitting a hurdle now might cost an athlete a tenth of a second. Fifty or sixty years ago, it could mean a broken leg.

“It was straight upback and did not have anything on it that would give,” Johnny Morriss said of the hurdles he conquered in tying the world record with a time of 14.3 seconds in 1933.

In one exhibition race in Cleveland, Morriss didn’t even run in a straight. “We ran on the baseball field,” he recalled. “The high hurdles started at home plate and five hurdles were down the right field line. Then it curved toward centerfield for the last five hurdles. Of course, it was all on grass. I ran 14.6, and it was published as a world record.”

His first taste of international competition was a victory over Lord Burghley of England (the 1928 Olympic 400 meter hurdles champion, and one of the Olympians portrayed in the movie “Chariots of Fire”) in the 1930 Toronto World’s Fair. Lord Burghley was elected to Parliament in 1931, but was granted a leave of absence for the 1932 Olympics.

Morriss was a three-year letterman in football, basketball and track at Lafayette High, graduating in 1926. He earned 12 letters at Southwestern Louisiana Institute – four apiece in football and track, two apiece in football and golf.

Abbeville High hired him in 1930 – officially as a teacher and assistant principal, to protect his amateur status. But unofficially, he did plenty of coaching, Marty Broussard, then a student at Abbeville High, recalled Morriss setting up hurdles in the school’s hallway on rainy days to practice when he was preparing for a major meet.

The year before he broke the world record, Morriss was the first alternate in the 110 meter high hurdles on the 1932 U.S. Olympic team.

George Saling of Iowa, the NCAA champion, won the gold medal and Percy Beard, who had nipped Morriss by a foot for the third spot on the U.S. team, won the silver medal.

One year later, Morriss won the national AAU championship at Chicago’s Soldier Field with a world record clocking of 14.3 seconds in a qualifying heat. Perseverance paid off for Morriss, who had finished fourth or fifth in the previous three national AAU championships. Third place in that race went to Al Moreau of LSU, another member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.

The other “old-timer” in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame is Glen “Slats” Hardin, whose specialties were the longer hurdles races.

After the 1933 national AAU meet in Chicago, Morriss toured Europe for two months and won 17 consecutive races in international competition. In the World Student Games in Turin, Italy, Morriss was selected to carry the U.S. flag in the opening parade of nations. He won the high hurdles in that meet. Throughout his career, he wore a red and white SLI shirt, even in European meets.

Morriss, who coached athletes in four sports at Abbeville High, later coached North Carolina to Southern Conference championships four years in a row, directed SLI to three consecutive Gulf States Conference championships and led the University of Arkansas to the Southwest Conference cross country title. Between those stints, he spent three years in the U.S. Navy during World War II and worked with a Chicago athletic supply company for two years.

In 1955, Morriss took over the track and cross country program at the University of Houston. His Cougars won three consecutive national AAU cross country championships.

Morriss coached 30 All-Americans in track and field, and 36 in cross country. His athletes tied or broke eight world records, and nine of them competed in the Olympic Games – three for the United States and six for Canada.

He originated the “Meet of Champions” in Houston and brought indoor track to Houston. Morriss was instrumental in bringing the national championship meet to Houston’s Jeppesen Stadium in 1986.

“He’s the only man I know,” said one friend, “who can start talking about football, basketball or anything else, and wind up talking about track.”

Morriss, author of The Self-Coached Runner, is the only track coach from Louisiana or Texas to be elected president of both the NCAA Cross Country Coaches’ Association and the Outdoor Track Coaches’ Association. He is a member of numerous Halls of Fame.

In recent years, Morriss has been battling Alzheimer’s disease. A man who had seven holes-in-one as a golfer, his golf game has been limited to practicing putts in the backyard of Houston’s Sheltering Arms Day Center. The game that kept him alert was dominoes.

Alzheimer’s is a progressive, degenerative disease that claims more than 100,000 lives a year – making it the fourth leading cause of death nationally behind heart disease, cancer and stroke.

His wife, Nona, said the most difficult thing was watching a dynamic person who was always self-reliant become dependent on others for everything. “We still have a lot of good conversations,” she said in the winter of 1991. “We take walks and we have friends who involved us in what they do. But I cry easily now. That’s something I never used to do.”