First round of the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials in Sacramento. Runners at their marks, limbs shooting out in all directions, eyes closing, necks stretching, balls of feet lining up in the blocks. As always, each man undergoes a quirky personal inventory. Achilles ... check. Calves ... check. Hamstrings ... check. The stadium is enveloped in an underground silence. The moment before is the moment that matters most, when a strange alchemy takes place within each runner. Bravado becomes either fear or confidence. You choose. Nobody can help you. This is where man is broken down to his purest elements. Get there first, no excuses. As the bodies settle in like seven torpedoes locked and loaded, a voice calls out to Maurice Greene, world's fastest human:

"You're going to need that 9.79 speed today."

Whatever Greene lacked in motivation for a first-round heat he gains with this bold challenge. To Greene, agitation is the sincerest form of flattery -- or, perhaps more accurately, insanity. His interest piqued, he looks to the next lane, locking his eyes on the offender, veteran sprinter Jonathan Carter. But Greene's response is utter silence. The man whose mouth is considered his sport's sharpest blade says absolutely nothing. His eyes hold, waiting for Carter to comprehend the enormity of his mistake. In his mind, though, the electrons fire. As his eyes bore into Carter, Greene thinks, Okay, what's about to happen is all your fault. I'm about to put it down now. I'm about to run something.

This is what sprinters are all about. They seek the edge, any edge -- psychological, physical, mystical. They trash-talk and mean-mug all day, then take the highest umbrage when someone does it to them. They'll do anything for an edge -- stare for it, talk for it, lie for it. Even take a chance of igniting the world's fastest human in an attempt to get it.

The gun is raised, then fired. Greene puts it down to the tune of 9.93, which includes a five-meter coast to the finish line. He thinks it's as close as he has come to the perfect race since he broke the world record with a 9.79 in Athens last year. The ideal is 45 steps, each step averaging about 0.083 of a second, with maximum speed -- roughly 27 mph -- reached somewhere near the 70-meter mark. That is perfection. This was close. "That might have been one of the best," Greene says. "If that had been a final, that might have been the one. We might be talking about that one."

***

Maurice Greene wants to be the greatest sprinter in history. He was the '99 world champ in both the 100 and the 200, the first man to pull off the feat. But that isn't enough. Just 26 years old, Greene has broken 10 seconds 29 times, more than any sprinter in history -- 14 times more than the next guy, Carl Lewis. He reached Ben Johnson's fabled 9.79, a number stricken from the books when Johnson was discovered to be a mobile pharmacy in Seoul. He took Donovan Bailey's official world record of 9.84 -- set at the '96 Games -- and shattered it by 0.05, the largest margin by which the record has ever been reduced. But that still isn't enough.

Greene wants to be known, and loved, and appreciated, and understood. He wants to win the 100 in Sydney the way a condemned man wants a stay of execution. From this point on, he won't have to rely on random, starting-block motivation. In fact, after the hyper-hyped double flameout with archrival Michael Johnson in the 200 finals at the trials, you might say Greene no longer wants the 100 gold. You'd have to say he needs it.

"How do people rate sprinters?" he asks, then answers: "By the Olympics. If you don't win the gold, you're not the greatest. My career without a gold will be worthless." When an eyebrow is raised at the harshness of this critique, Greene shoots it down. "Hey, that's the truth -- worthless and void."

World-class sprinters wear their egos like a Day-Glo singlet. They squawk and preen and primp. They announce themselves to one another and to the world with preposterously wide struts and flagrant self-congratulation. They are proud adherents to a culture based on the importance of microseconds. They train every day for years to perfect something that takes less than 10 seconds to complete. Maybe because of this, they share a tortured look. They need the right food, the right temperature, the right wind direction. They need someone to carry their bags lest they throw their bodies off balance. For the most part, sprinters are compulsively ritualistic and necessarily self-absorbed. And for all the talk, they're essentially museum pieces, sealed safely behind velvet ropes, encased in glass. Look but don't touch. Greene has a different idea. He wants to be the people's sprinter, accessible and real -- traits he won't ascribe to America's two dominant sprinters of the past two decades, King Carl and MJ. "I feel good about myself," he says. "I want to share that. I want people to know I'm approachable. Unlike some other guys, I'm only moody when I'm competing."

He has been criticized for being immature (by Johnson) and for lacking humility (by nearly everyone else). But part of Greene's desire to be the antithesis of those two stars stems from his experience with them. When he was a promising young sprinter training in his hometown of Kansas City, Kan., Greene once defeated Lewis in the 100. Asked after the race to assess Greene's potential, Lewis said, "Who?" As for Johnson, he and Greene met in the drug-testing tent after the finals of the 200 in Sacramento. According to Greene, he approached Johnson and said, "Get well soon, Michael." Johnson pretended he wasn't there.

Greene, first and foremost, seems interested in enjoying himself. He drives a convertible Mercedes with the license plate "MO GOLD," and sometimes wears T-shirts with the inscription "Pheno-MO-nal." While being interviewed during the trials in a booth sponsored by his team, HSI, Greene excused himself when passersby began to congregate around him, staring and snapping pictures. He ran to his car and returned seconds later with autographed trading cards, which he handed out with a handshake and a smile.

"I read things about Maurice and just laugh," says his father, Ernest. "For instance, when he won the 100 at the '97 world championships, everyone made a big deal out of him sticking out his tongue at Bailey after crossing the finish line. Well, we have pictures of Maurice from when he was 9 and 10 years old, sticking out his tongue as he crossed the finish line. He's been doing that forever."

Greene comes from a close family -- 35 of them made the trip to Sacramento -- and he has a special relationship with five boys back home in Kansas. Maurice's mother, Jackie, agreed to raise her niece's five young sons four years ago when their mom was having trouble coping. To Stephen, Robert, Jerome, Martin and Mark -- ranging in age from 6 to 13 -- Maurice is nothing short of a hero. He bought his parents a house in a nicer neighborhood, in part to make sure the boys would be in a better school district. He bought Jackie a minivan to chauffeur them around. He promised to visit their schools if they kept their grades up, and when they did, he came home to make the cafeteria-hall lecture circuit.

"I didn't understand the importance of school and good grades until it was too late," says Maurice, who didn't get the necessary scores on standardized tests to qualify for a track scholarship out of Schlagle High. "I don't want them to make the same mistakes I did." Greene never attended a four-year college, but he substituted hard work for education. While attending Kansas City (Kan.) Community College, he continued to train under his longtime coach, ex-Marine Al Hobson. There was no glory there, at least not the kind Greene wanted. He supported his sprinting habit by working on loading docks and in warehouses and chain restaurants. His résumé spawned one of sprinter Ato Boldon's favorite lines: "Maurice has held the 10 worst jobs in the fast-food industry."

Greene eventually reached the conclusion that his aspirations would forever stay ahead of his achievements unless he left Kansas. After failing to reach the 100 semis at the '96 trials, he drove to Atlanta and sat in the stands, tears running down his face as he watched Canada's Bailey break the world record. Next time, Greene vowed, it wouldn't happen without him. Two months later, he moved to Los Angeles to train with famed coach John Smith, who teams with attorney/agent Emanuel Hudson to run HSI (Hudson-Smith International). "Al taught me to be a pro," Greene says of Hobson. "John Smith taught me to compete as a pro."

Smith broke down Greene's sprinting, step by step, then spent a year putting it back together. It was a trying time for a runner who wanted everything now. He wanted to win every race, run faster each time. "That's Maurice," Smith says. "When he came to me, he said, 'America doesn't care about sprinting anymore, and I want United States track and field on my back. I want the responsibility.'"

Smith's philosophy leans toward the esoteric, if not the celestial. He attributes part of Greene's determination, and his own, to their shared astrological sign. "Leos don't like to be told what they can't do," Smith says. He sees Greene's failure to qualify in the 200 as a blessing. "This will make it sweeter," he says. "When it takes a little longer to reach your goal, you appreciate it more. When I say things I believe Maurice can accomplish, people say, 'That's impossible.' You know what? That's where I live. I live in the impossible. We are what we think about, and if we think we're limited, we will be. I want Maurice to be thinking about the unthinkable. I want him to constantly improve upon the improvement of the improvement."

His coach believes Greene has the ability to drop the 100 world record below 9.7 seconds, which would be an improvement on several improvements. But within the insular track community, Greene's association with HSI (a.k.a. Handling Speed Intelligently) has earned him his share of detractors. Loud, successful and supremely self-confident, HSI athletes are a breed apart. The group includes the entire U.S. contingent in the 100 -- Greene, Curtis Johnson and Jon Drummond -- as well as Boldon, the Trinidad native considered Greene's greatest threat for the gold. Their motto is "No Speed Limit," and most rivals believe it applies to mouths as well as feet.

"They need the hype to get them going," says Brian Lewis, a member of the 4x100 relay team that features Drummond, Johnson and Greene as anchor. "But Maurice will trash-talk you and then congratulate you."

Greene's confidence is best exemplified by his contention that he can alter a race by merely being in it -- as if the undertow of his talent can subsume some of the world's fastest men. "It's true," Boldon says. "I've seen it happen." Did it happen to Michael Johnson in Sacramento? Hamstring injuries kept both Johnson and Greene from finishing the 200, but could there have been more to it? Was the prospect of losing simply too much to swallow? In the aftermath of the buildup and the letdown, a haze of suspicion settled over both runners. ("I don't even think he was hurt," winner John Capel said of Greene.) But Mo won't go there now. "People can believe what they want to believe," he says.

Boldon believes this: "I think Maurice won the war of words. The really, really good Michael wouldn't have anything to say. He got caught up in it, and nobody wins a war of words with Maurice."

Sometimes, not even Maurice.

***

After winning the 100 at the trials, Greene danced his victory lap, did the on-track TV interviews and then took his act straight to the people. Barefoot, he hurdled a steel barricade next to the track and stepped over another to get to the crowd draping over the edge. This obviously presented something of a security situation. Serious cops in their wrap-around shades, mustaches and boots advanced in confused haste, determined to keep Greene from doing what Greene wanted to do. Dust hung in the air like silt, lending a county-fair atmosphere to the scene. Greene signed and slapped and shook hands with kids holding programs and grown men smiling the surprised smile of proximity. Women showing vast amounts of themselves struggled to get closer. One man held up one of the red spikes Greene had tossed into the stands. The cops closed in, giving it their best hey-break-it-up act, not quite sure who was supposed to be moved, and to where. Greene ignored them. These officers had undoubtedly been told to keep the people away from the performers, and this was messing with their sense of propriety. Were they supposed to protect Greene from himself? This was not covered in the manual.

About 10 feet away, in the sanctuary of the barricaded walkway, a meet official wearing a cowboy hat and a face full of sweat shook his head and looked at Emanuel Hudson. "This is really something else, isn't it?"

"No, it isn't," Hudson said, never taking his eyes off Greene. "This is the way it's supposed to be."

This article appears in the September 18, 2000 issue of ESPN The Magazine.