Tim Montgomery: ‘I had the best job in the world – now I’m in prison clearing leaves’ - Times Online
For Tim Montgomery, formerly the fastest man in the world, today will start the same as every day. There are 47 inmates sleeping in his prison dormitory and he has a top bunk; he will be woken at 5am and he will have to make his bed in time to be in breakfast at 5.30. The bed has to be “military-style” perfect, the hospital corners at 45 degrees, the turnover “cuff” the length of the palm of a hand.
At 6.30am, he will start work; he is called a landscaper, which means that he will be sweeping leaves, and he will make 12 cents (about 7.5p) an hour for it. And it will be the same tomorrow and the next day, and if he serves his entire sentence, this routine may go unchecked until his release day, January 6, 2016.
That is a long time to live by your wits. Trust no other inmates, he says, “you never know what a man might do to you”. And avoid the TV room because it is over the TV that the fights break out. Never change the channel. Never.
When he was in another prison, a riot broke out because of the TV and when they had sent in the “Goon Squad” with their shields and Taser guns and order had been restored, they gave the inmates 21 days’ confinement to their cells.
Thoughts of outside sustain him. He mentions Paris and he does so with pride, as if it still belongs to him. The reference is September 14, 2002, the day he ran 100 metres in 9.78sec, a world record at the time, in the Grand Prix Final. That was also the day that Marion Jones celebrated with him on the track, when she kissed him in public and they let the world know who they were: the world’s fastest couple. “About as high as a man could go,” he says. “It seemed.”
They rose together and then they crashed together. And Montgomery’s landing was as an inmate with a number — 56836-083 — and two convictions on his record. The first for bank fraud, the depositing of counterfeit cheques worth $1.7 million (now about £1 million). And the second, for which he was charged when awaiting sentencing for the first, possession and distribution of heroin. And now it is in this Federal Prison Camp, in the city with which he shares a name, Montgomery, Alabama, that he is paying the penalty.
This interview is conducted in a prison meeting room; Montgomery is wearing an olive shirt and trousers and a belt with a shiny buckle, the standard uniform for receiving visitors.
And he talks for four hours about his athletic talents and how he wasted them, about how his envy of Maurice Greene drove him to take performance-enhancing drugs, about Jones, about how they fell so low that they landed in prison, and about the hell of prison life and how his recent marriage inside the prison may be his salvation. “I destroyed myself,” he says. “I’ve been trying to be a man all my life and now I’m in here treated like a kid.”
Here, he acknowledges, a minimum security prison where no one is serving more than ten years, is not as bad as others he has experienced. When he started his sentence a year ago, he never settled long, he was moved from prison to prison and stopped off at tough prisons, including Portsmouth, Virginia, and Oklahoma, places where “guys had shanks — home-made knives — and it seemed like someone was stabbed every day. And they put baby oil in water, microwaved it and poured it on other people.
“In one prison I probably saw 35 fights and I was involved in that riot. They thought I was the leader of the riot. They made us kneel against the wall for 90 minutes; one of the guards pushed his shield into my back twice and electric-shocked me and was shouting, ‘Are you the leader? We know you are running this block.’
“You can never relax in prison. I cannot tell you how bad it is. You have to join a gang for protection. You have to let it be known: ‘If you come at me, I’m going to give you all I’ve got, I’m willing to lay it all on the line for my respect.’ In a New York prison I was celled once with a paedophile and I had to beat him. It was against my morals; I believe everyone deserves a second chance. But if I didn’t, the other inmates would have thought I was soft.
“In prison, it is all about respect; the same as on the track. My gift — my speed — was my saviour. It won me respect from the guys who work out — and they’re normally the strong guys.”
How does a man fall so low? Montgomery does not blame his upbringing, but he concedes that he may have always been destined for this. He had “two of the best parents”, his father fought in Vietnam and brought back discipline and a moral code to their home in Gaffney, South Carolina. “I didn’t have to resort to the streets,” he says, but even as a teenager he was dealing crack cocaine. “I just had that urge of living on the edge. I’m a thrill-seeking kind of guy.”
Throughout this interview, I ask him about guilt, the state of his soul — did it not trouble him to cheat the athletics world, to take drugs, to push heroin? And his answer was consistent, honest and cold. “You ask me how I feel — and I have to dig deep to get to feelings,” he says. “Did I feel I was crossing the line when I was doping? No, not coming from the streets. It wasn’t even a second thought. I’m not going to sugar-coat it, there wasn’t even a second thought that I was cheating. It was all about getting one over the system and if I could, I would.
“That was what I learnt on the streets. But I tell you, if I’m cold, Marion’s even colder. Marion didn’t care about anything.”
The attitude that Montgomery took to taking drugs was the same he took to pushing them. It was only, he says, in a cell in Portsmouth, where he saw another man hugging the rim of a basin, vomiting, sweating and shaking violently that he understood exactly what sort of a business he had been in.
“I had been dealing drugs as a kid, so it just seemed routine,” he says. “Not until that day in Portsmouth did I have a guilt.”
He has now, he says, been the recipient of a long, hard lesson. To his way of thinking, his crimes had been merely an extension of “my mischievous games as a child”.
“If only I could have got this lesson earlier,” he says. “All I had to do was wake up and train. I had the best job in the world and now I’m in prison clearing leaves.”
It was when he believed that Maurice Greene had been buying from the same dealer that Montgomery knew for sure that he would have a chance of getting level. Greene has always denied taking performance-enhancing drugs but his success, the wealth it brought him, his demeanour and his “clowning” sowed a dark covetousness into the psyche of his rival and it was this, more than anything, that led Montgomery to exchange the life of a frustrated B-list sprinter for a bent one who was, briefly, on top of the world.
As a teenager, Montgomery was a phenomenal talent; he was always very slight, a smooth mover, not a power runner. At the age of 19, in 1994, he broke the world junior 100 metres record; the record failed to stand because the track was discovered to be 3.7 centimetres short. Nevertheless, he was one to watch.
In 1996, aged 21, he made the United States sprint relay team for the Atlanta Olympics and Greene, who is five months older, did not. The year after, though, Greene won gold in the World Championships in Athens and Montgomery took bronze. It would be another five years before he was ahead again.
“Maurice got in my head real bad,” he says. “I wanted everything that he had. The meet organisers and the shoe companies, they said, ‘If you can’t beat these guys — Greene and Ato Boldon — we can’t pay you like them.
“It was bad enough without him lining up and flexing his muscles the way he did and flicking his tongue. It was embarrassing the way he was out there clowning the other athletes. Our races weren’t about the times we ran; for me it was personal. All I wanted was the person.”
It was after the 1999 World Championships in Seville that Montgomery decided to get him. He talks about “selling my soul”. “I would give anything to be the world’s fastest,” he says. “I wouldn’t let anything get in my way.”
The decision he made, therefore, was to leave his coach, Steve Riddick, and join Trevor Graham. Graham was successful, he had got Jones consistently beating the world; Montgomery did not know if they were doping, but he suspected they were and was prepared to join them.
The crucial conversation took place at Graham’s house one evening. Graham started telling him about power, about how he was too slight; he was so blatant he started showing Montgomery a video of Ben Johnson to demonstrate his point. “He was saying to me, ‘There’s no telling what you can do when you’re using steroids,’ ” Montgomery says.
It is at this point that most reasonable people would stop to think and to examine their conscience — because this was the moment when Montgomery crossed the line. But, as he explains, conscience did not enter the equation. “I was thinking, ‘This is the green light,’ ” he says. “All I wanted was the big Nike contract, the commercials, I wanted to be the star.”
His next stop was over the Mexico border to follow up on the introduction to Angel Heredia, whom Graham used as the supplier of performance-enhancing drugs to his athletes.
Montgomery claims that he was shown paperwork showing Heredia’s various clients and he asserts that one of the names he saw was Greene.
This allegation has been aired before, by Heredia, although Greene has denied that he ever used drugs. When evidence was published last year of a bank transaction and blood analysis in Greene’s name, Greene said that he disapproved of doping and that everything he bought from Heredia was destined for others in his training group, not himself.
But Montgomery’s attitude, on meeting Heredia, was that he had finally arrived. Was he concerned about getting caught? “No,” he says. “Being suspended for two years didn’t cross my mind. Other people weren’t getting caught. Angel’s father told me, ‘It clears your system in 12 days; all you have to do is hide for 12 days.’
“So for 12 days, we would turn the lights on at the track, train at night and stay in hotels in the day. When I lived with Marion, I got cameras put on the gates so if a tester came, I’d know not to answer the door.”
Real improvement, though, did not come for another year, until the advent of Project World Record. By now, Graham had switched suppliers and was working with Victor Conte, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (Balco) in Burlingame, California. Project World Record was designed specifically to turn Montgomery into the world’s fastest man and it was born in a Balco meeting room with none other than Charlie Francis, the former coach of Ben Johnson, as a specialist consultant.
Once again, this did not trigger Montgomery’s concern but, instead, his ambition. “I knew I was getting the edge,” he says. “I knew we were beating the system. But the system had been beating me. Charlie said to me, ‘Tim, you have the ability to be the world record-holder.’ I don’t think there’s a person in sprinting smarter than Charlie Francis.”
Sure enough, Francis was right. In 2001, Greene just stayed ahead of Montgomery and in 2002, Montgomery finally reeled him in, beating him comprehensively in a grand prix in Brussels. Montgomery says: “Maurice came up to me after that and said, ‘You’re there, huh?’ And I said, ‘It was only a matter of time.’ But after I got fast, Maurice ducked a lot of races. You could see the mojo had changed. You can see in an athlete when you’ve got ’em, when you’ve taken the fight out of them.”
Two weeks after the Brussels meeting, Montgomery ran his 9.78sec in Paris. It was as fast as he would ever get, the height from which he began his long descent.
Two points about Montgomery that accentuate how much talent he had and how much he abused it. One: his world record may have been wiped but he insists he did it clean. The drugs that Conte gave him, he says, gave him terrible stomach cramps so he quit them and, in 2002, started taking clean nutritional supplements instead. Yet he realises few would believe him. “I know my word is like lunchmeat, you can take it or leave it,” he says. Two: because he was more interested in the rewards of winning than winning itself, he will never know quite where his natural talent might have taken him.
“I had all the natural elements to achieve what I wanted, as long as I put in 100 per cent,” he says. “But I never did. Because I wanted to be the person in the nightclub, partying, getting by in life.”
But his life started to crumple after Balco was raided in September 2003. A year later, he was fighting a doping charge and needed to fund growing legal fees. “I had been living beyond my means from the track world anyway,” he says. “I needed money and the only way I knew how to make money was drugs.” In other words, he used one crime to fund his defence against another.
Most of the others in this cast fell to earth, too. Jones served six months in prison last year for perjuring herself on the doping and the cheque fraud cases; Conte did four months in prison and four on house arrest; and Graham has just completed a year’s sentence of home confinement.
Greene, meanwhile, has a tattoo on his right bicep that reads GOAT — as in Greatest Of All Time — and trades on his success. He is still an ambassador for adidas and has done the rounds of the TV reality shows. The IAAF, the world athletics federation, confirmed yesterday that it was not aware of any investigation into any alleged connection to doping.
Montgomery, meanwhile, continues to pay the price. He is sustained by the support of Jamalee, the mother of one of his four children, and the woman he once left in order to move in with Jones. On October 5, he and Jamalee were married in the prison chapel. She was allowed to stay for 30 minutes after the service.
One thing he detests is his inability to be a parent. “When your kids come to see you, how can you tell them to be good when you are here in prison?” he says. So he can contribute in some small way, he is considering having Jamalee put his medals on eBay.
He says he has learnt his lesson and he would like his story to be a warning to others. There can be few, though, who have so willingly taken a sledgehammer to their talent, and so willingly pursued their own destruction.
