When a world track record that had stood for 15 years was broken in Poland last Saturday, the reverberations were felt as far away as Iowa City, Iowa and Russellville, Ky. Those same tremors should serve as a wakeup call for many Panther fans.
One of the men who had held that record all these years was Andre Morris, who has been gone from Russellville most of the time since he led Coach Ken Barrett’s 1990 Panthers to their third and last (to date) state football championship.
Because of his absence—he has lived in Iowa most of the last 23 years, many of us who were delighted by his blazing moves on the Rhea Stadium and Cardinal Stadium turfs had lost track of his track career, so to speak. Even those who knew he had enjoyed an excellent track career at the University of Iowa may not have realized the extent of his spectacular success or the heights he has reached as a world class sprinter.
At RHS, Coach Barrett made two strategic moves that proved to be the turning points for that state championship football season. He put dynamic defender Larry Johnson at quarterback and fleet wide receiver Andre Morris at running back. Coupling them with rugged running back Onassa Duncan and a solid offensive line led by future University of Kentucky starting guard Andy Britt, and this Barrett’s Bunch was a winner throughout the season.
Morris also was a track star. He was the state champion 400 meter runner and joined with Duncan and fellow football back Terrell Jackson along with basketball standout Taylor Gamble to win the state championship in the 4x400 Relay. That same foursome was state runner-up in the 4X100 Relay, and Morris finished second in the state in the 200 Meter. Assistant football coach Steve Merideth was the RHS track coach at the time.
Morris went to Hutchison Community College in Kansas to play football, but twisted his ankle early and missed the season. Instead he ran track and immediately became a junior college All-America runner.
The University of Iowa offered him a full-scholarship, and he transferred to the major college in Iowa City for this last three years. He won the Big Ten championship in the 400 three straight years, but the first didn’t count because he was ruled to have stepped on his lane line too many times. So officially, he is a two-time 400 Meter Big Ten champion. He also won the Big Ten in the 200 Meter one year and won two more Big Ten championships as part of the 4X100 Relay team. He was a three-time Division I All-American.
“I got great coaching from Ted Wheeler, a two-time Olympian who had marched with Martin Luther King and had known Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and Lena Horne. I learned so much from him,” Morris told The LoJo this week.
After college, he continued running and was ranked seventh in the nation in a group that featured the legendary Michael Johnson and Butch Reynolds. “I was running in the height of the steroid era, and a lot of the top guys weren’t going to be beaten by someone like me who wasn’t using.”
He was invited to tryouts for both the 1996 and 2000 Olympic teams but didn’t make those squads. He did run in eight U.S. Nationals, five of them indoors. He was a two-time world indoor champion, helping set that world record in a city just outside Tokyo in 1999 that stood until 2014. That was one of two world meets he ran in Japan. He’s run all over the world, including in Africa.
“I got to meet some really super people in those world games. One U.S. team I was with included basketball players Alan Iverson. Tim Duncan and Ray Allen,” he recalls. “I’ve been around a lot of great athletes. Kurt Warner, who had some great Super Bowl years, used to come back to the University of Iowa, and he and I would throw footballs to each other. I got to talk with my all-time favorite football player, Doug Williams, for about four hours one day. The Redskins were my team and he broke the color barrier for NFL quarterbacks. I also met Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow.”
Although his greatest successes have come in track, the sport football was and is Andre’s first love. “I always wanted to be a football player, but God gave me the ability to run track and I felt that I owed it to Him to use my skills.”
Known as Dre Mo, he played semi-pro football and in 1999 was invited to a tryout with the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League after sending the team some of his stats and video tapes, including some from his days at RHS. There he worked out with guys like the legendary Julius Peppers.
“I ran the fastest 40 they had ever seen at 4.11, and four of the five coaches who were grading us wanted to keep me for the Panthers, but it had to be unanimous,” Morris remembers. “They told me to play in the World Football League, and they would look at me again, but then I injured my knee playing that year. So that ended by football dreams.”
He kept running even though he was injured, keeping it up until five years ago, almost two decades after he left Russellville. He had surgery on the knee three years ago.
He graduated from Iowa with a degree in art, but he doesn’t get to do much of that. He has six children, ranging from the oldest, 22-year-old Deshaun Bellamy of Russellville, to a one-year-old and a four-year-old. He also has a son in college and two 18-year-old daughters. He is married to the former Kim Bastic.
His brother Stacy teaches at RHS and another relative, Kia Morris, works at the high school. Current RHS athletes M.J. Jones and Tremon Morris are his cousins. Two of his closest friends who are also his cousins, Reggie Collier and Anthony Johnson, are here. He says moving back to Russellville is in his and Kim’s future.
The United States dominates the 400 meter and 4X400 Relay. In fact, the team which broke that 15-year-old record—Kyle Clemons, David Verburg, Kind Butler III and Calvin Smith Jr.—helped the United States dominate the World Indoor Championships this year. Their time was seven-tenths of a second faster than the record time of 3:2.83 set in 1999.
Russellvillians can always remember one of their own set one of the most enduring records in track history.