Defending NCAA 800-meter champ isn't comfy with the crown

Ryan Brown, the University of Washington's NCAA champion at 800 meters, arrives for an interview wearing a T-shirt befitting that kingly status: "Renton Invitational, 2002."

That's pretty much vintage Brown, and what he remembers most about that high-school race — "throwing up all over the place" after anchoring a second-place 4 x 800 — is pretty much how he feels before any meet five years later.

Meet Washington's accidental champion.

Don't take that the wrong way. You don't get to be an 800-meter college titlist — remarkably, Washington's first outdoors title by an individual male athlete on the track since 1930 — without guts and talent and the ability to function when you come off the last turn with your body knotted like rubber bands inside a golf ball.

It's just there are so many reasons for Brown not to have won an NCAA title, not the least of which is that he takes the word self-effacing to a whole different level.

"The conversations we have before races, they're interesting for sure," said Greg Metcalf, the UW track coach. "He goes, 'I don't have to win today, do I?' "

But he's gotten better at that.

"I remember when he won his first Pac-10 meet at UCLA [in 2005]," Metcalf said. "I was bringing friends to have conversations with him at the track, he was so nervous."

Here's a slice of Brown bombast, on the notion that he could become a repeat winner in June in Sacramento: "I'm not going to bank my worth on it. I've won already. I'd like somebody else to enjoy that feeling."

You get the idea. This is not Chad Johnson in track spikes.

Brown grew up in Baltimore, just a half-mile from old Memorial Stadium, where the neighborhood kids could hear the swells of the crowd during the days of Eddie Murray and a young Cal Ripken Jr.

Baseball was Brown's first love. Matter of fact, it still may be. He attended K-12 school with Ripken's young daughter. And even though the Red Sox and Yankees have long dominated the American League East, he refers to the Orioles as "We."

At 14, Brown moved to Renton to live with his stepbrother Richard, some 16 years older. Richard had lived in Juneau, Alaska, before moving south to more temperate weather.

Ryan visited a couple of summers out here and figured the move west would keep him from harm's way in urban Baltimore.

"It's all around you there," said Brown. "Some of my friends are even dead now. The opportunity was too great. I figured as a pre-emptive strike, I'd just get away."

He was a baseball player at Renton High, but more than anything, he was a student.

"Until recently, he couldn't accept a B," said Richard. "I remember one time [at Renton], he literally locked himself in his room after he got like an 87-point-something, a B that he knew he could have aced.

"I'm like, 'Ryan, it ain't that bad.' He'll beat himself up for a low grade, stay up and deprive himself of sleep."

He played baseball through his junior year, but the team wasn't very good, and he couldn't hit. So he joined some friends on the track team, and the results were shocking. As a senior, he won league, district and state 800-meter titles, the last in 1 minute, 55.3 seconds.

You wouldn't call it a pitched recruiting battle to get Brown. Metcalf called him a day or two after the state meet and Brown said he was already going to attend Washington. Metcalf said he'd like to have him on the team, without financial aid.

Brown arrived, but so did the growing crush of college schoolwork and the demands of a sprints coach, Dion Miller, who is now at Arizona State. Brown ran well but developed a stress fracture near the end of the season.

"I couldn't run," Brown said. "The pressure was off me. I could just hang out and be normal."

He liked that so much, he decided he didn't need track and left the team. But he found he missed it, and in February 2004, he approached Metcalf to return.

"I believe you can win a Pac-10 championship," Metcalf told him.

Brown redshirted that season but proved Metcalf right in 2005, clocking a brisk 1:47.31 to win the Pac-10. By now, he was training with Metcalf's distance runners rather than the sprinters, and the change flattered him.

A year later, Brown went Metcalf one better, running down the leaders and setting a school record of 1:46.29 at the NCAA meet. As always, he did it with finishing speed that Metcalf has timed at 22.2 over 200 meters from a rolling start.

"A lot of middle-distance runners tie up [in the late stages] and their mechanics go," Metcalf said. "Ryan, under fire and stress, his mechanics are still great. His mechanics are still fluid and powerful when he's tired."

Not to say you just wind him up and he wins. Metcalf is such a security blanket for Brown that when he went solo to the USA meet last summer, a couple of weeks after the NCAA, he bombed.

"Dead last," said Brown, whose next challenge is this weekend's Pac-10 meet at Stanford. "I'm a mental wreck without my coach. I think I had an NCAA hangover. I didn't really care at all."

Brown added an NCAA indoor title over the winter, but duplicating his 2006 championship — you can almost see him blanching — will be a formidable task.

USC's Duane Solomon ran a fast early-season 1:47.19, and there's also the specter of one of America's hottest prospects, Sudanese refugee Lopez Lomong of Northern Arizona, who has run 1:47. But Lomong could concentrate on the 1,500 meters.

If it doesn't happen, Brown has other options — world championships, the 2008 Olympics and intentions of making money at this, to build on his biology degree, go to grad school and become a physical therapist.

"I don't know how to explain it," said his brother, discussing Ryan's deferential nature. "He's humble. He doesn't want people to expect a lot out of him."

Increasingly, they can't help themselves.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com