Irish legend leads Villanova into Relays

It is one of the great twists of Irish miling fate that Marcus O'Sullivan, just the third man in history to record 100 sub-four minute miles, even began running in the first place. At age seven, he thought about taking up the sport, made one trip to his local club and got beaten by all the girls. At 12, he thought about trying out for his grammar school team but was dissuaded from joining the squad. "I just kind of put my hand up and volunteered," said O'Sullivan, now in his third year as Villanova's head men's track and field coach, "and the Brother at the time said, 'Mr. O'Sullivan, I think you ought to sit this event out. This cross-country is for tough guys.'" Oh-for-two, O'Sullivan decided to give up running. And so the track career of one of Ireland's great milers might have ended before it began, if not for one particularly demanding physical education teacher. "The teacher said, 'Unless you have a doctor's note, I want everyone out for cross country,'" O'Sullivan recalled. "So he got 150 kids out for cross country." The practice was soon discontinued after a flurry of parental complaints, but not before O'Sullivan was planted barefoot on a soccer field and forced to run laps with his entire first-year high school class. "I just remember it was a total oxygen debt, I didn't know where I was or what happened," O'Sullivan said. "And then some guy grabs me and says, 'Hey, you're No. 4. You made the team.' And that's how it all started." That high school squad went on to become the best in the country, and O'Sullivan wound up being lured to Villanova in the fall of 1980 as part of the "Irish Pipeline," a tradition of stellar Irish distance runners on the Main Line. After a college career that saw him capture a pair of NCAA indoor titles and 10 Big East indoor and outdoor crowns, he entered the international circuit. Fourteen years, four Olympic appearances, three 1,500-meter World Indoor Championships and 101 sub-four minute miles later, Marcus O'Sullivan decided to take up coaching. O'Sullivan, who earned an MBA from his alma mater in '89 and worked as a part-time faculty member of the Marketing Department in the early '90s, had no previous experience. "A lot of people said, 'Oh, he just got the job because he was a Villanova athlete, and he doesn't know what he's doing in coaching -- a couple years from now you'll see how bad he is,'" said Charlie Powell, Penn's longtime men's track coach. "Well, it's just the opposite. "Those naysayers have been proven so wrong it's ridiculous." According to Michael Brown, a 'Nova senior who won the college men's 400 hurdles at last year's Penn Relays, O'Sullivan is an extremely personable guy who also manages to have a knowledge of track and field that extends well beyond his distance background. "I think he's really cool," Brown said. "If you ever have any kind of problem you can go to him, with housing, with school, whatever." According to Brown, when O'Sullivan returned to the Villanova scene trailing an impressive CV of international accomplishments, the athletes joked, 'Wow, Marcus O'Sullivan! Marcus O'Sullivan!" But Brown found his coach's wealth of experience a valuable tool to draw from at high-pressure meets like the Penn Relays and NCAA championships. And everyone on the team, from the sprinters to the throwers, seems to be awed by O'Sullivan's feat of longevity. At his best, O'Sullivan was a 3:50 miler and a 3:35 man in the 1,500. Slowed a bit, he found himself contemplating retirement nine years ago at the age of 30. When cleaning out his basement, he came upon a small bubble-wrapped item that he was ready to toss with the rest of the junk. Then he had a second thought, and unwrapped it. "It was a little trophy about the size of your hand, a little trophy that said North Carolina, 1983, and I realized immediately what it was and why I had kept it," he said. "It was my first sub-four mile." Looking at the trophy, O'Sullivan remembered how he felt immediately after the race, in all the glory of a 21-year-old college kid who'd just broken a track barrier and then headed straight for the bathroom, throwing up everywhere. Then, feeling a new sense of track purpose, he went upstairs and began adding up the number of official sub-fours he'd clocked, around 70. Suddenly, he had a reason not to retire. "I said, 'You know what? It would be kind of nice to try to finish up at 100.' And it extended my career for five years." Three years ago, the five-time Millrose Games champion returned to Madison Square Garden and clocked a third-place finish of 3:58.1, his 100th sub-four mile. But for all the successful meets in his lengthy career, it's telling about O'Sullivan that the one that seems to stick out in his mind is the '83 Penn Relays. Villanova won 16 distance medleys in a row at Penn, but as a sophomore, O'Sullivan ran on a team that lost. Then, as a junior in '83, his relay teams lost the DMR as well as the 4x1,500, which 'Nova had won five years in a row. That weekend, Villanova failed to win any Penn Relays championships for the first time in 30 years. O'Sullivan returned to his native Ireland for the summer, ready to quit track and give up school for good. But his old coach, Donal Walsh -- himself a former Villanova distance runner -- convinced him that his problem was not inability but a need to "get [his] act together." He dedicated himself to training, and as a senior he found himself waiting to run the anchor leg of the 4x1,500 at the Penn Relays with Villanova trailing by 50 meters. Taking the baton, O'Sullivan clocked a 3:38 leg, then a personal best by four seconds, and the Wildcats won the race with an outstanding time of 14:52.81. "Penn [Relays] is very, very significant to me because it was my coming out, it was my maturing from boyhood to manhood," O'Sullivan said. "I left on very, very good notes." When he returned 15 Aprils later as Villanova's coach, O'Sullivan found himself trying to balance prepping his team for the century-old Carnival while struggling with his own nerves, which he could no longer nullify by pounding them out on the track. As a runner, O'Sullivan had considered the personal pressure at the Relays to be even greater than those he would later experience at the Olympics. But even that didn't compare to the pressures of coaching. But he relishes his new role on the sideline, eagerly anticipating this week's events. O'Sullivan the runner never aspired to coach, something he now considers to be more "of a give-back kind of thing" to his alma mater than anything else. And though he can't say how long he'll stay at Villanova, he would never take a coaching job at another school. But forget talk of leaving for the man whose running career was twice snuffed out before it began, and who twice came close to walking away from the track prematurely. His work on the sidelines has barely begun. "He understands the sport very well, and he understands people real well," Powell said. "I think he's going to be extremely successful, and I think he's going to be a great coach."

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