In The Fast Lane Again

"I don't want to complain, but how does three dollars' meal money sound on trips?" says Floyd. "You can't buy eggs for that most places. Not eggs and toast."

Rosen says Floyd was an exemplary team member during most of Auburn's spring schedule. "Maybe he felt overworked, but Stanley never came to me and begged out of a single workout or race," he says. "Perhaps he's forgotten that we didn't run hard on weekdays. We only ran hard on weekends." Floyd recalls it differently, saying he felt he had to carry too much of the Tigers' burden. "Before a meet [Rosen] would go to a board and write out how many points he expected from each of us. Bam, bam, bam, bam. It was determined. If you didn't get your points, you had failed. He always had me down for some ridiculous number, like 18 in the conference meet." (Floyd, in fact, scored 18� in the SEC outdoor championships.)

During his travels in the summer of '80, Floyd often asked Carl Lewis , who would be a sophomore at Houston that fall, why he chose the school. "You got the impression that he was shopping around," says Lewis . "I told him Houston was what you made it. The opportunities were there." Floyd also talked to Rosen, who coached the U.S. national team on the trip to China . "Stanley said that if he came back to Auburn he wanted to be able to pick and choose his races," Rosen says. "I told him that was impossible. He was part of the team, and he would do whatever the team needed. Otherwise he might as well start looking somewhere else." Former Auburn sprinter Harvey Glance , a friend and mentor of Floyd's, warned Rosen that Floyd was already doing just that. And when Floyd discovered that there would be no new sprinters to share the load, he made up his mind to leave Auburn.

Rosen, and many others, believe that Floyd's sudden success against world-class opposition and his tour of the lucrative European track circuit did indeed go to his head. "Let's put it this way," says Rosen. "If those things hadn't happened, Stanley would still be here." That Floyd had returned to Auburn driving a new Mazda RX-7—another gift from his brothers, he says—only made him seem all the more worldly. And Floyd admits he "was looking for a place where I'd get more exposure."

Actually, his withdrawal from Auburn got him plenty of pub—but not the kind he wanted. "I learned two things about leaving a school," he says. "One, you lose almost all your friends. Two, the press will do you in." Floyd claims he was misquoted frequently and that Rosen was being given all the credit for his rise to fame. "Coach Rosen didn't make me great," Floyd snaps. "I was a 9.3 sprinter coming out of high school. I had a gift of speed from God."

After his withdrawal from Auburn, Floyd was so incensed by Rosen's refusal to let him continue working out on the school's track that he thought about picking a fight with his former coach. "I was acting out of pure anger," says Floyd. "I had learned that the red carpet can roll up as easily as it went down."

Instead, Floyd returned to Putney in early October to decide about his future. He considered joining the Army or getting a job. But he knew from experience—the summers he had spent running a concessions stand at a public pool and toiling on a Putney road-paving crew—that work can be...a lot of work. After talking to Duncan and Cougar Head Coach Tom Tellez , he came to Houston in November of 1980.

"I never, ever got a transfer like that before," says Tellez, who more or less left Floyd on his own last year, while Floyd was going through the mandatory season of post-transfer ineligibility. Floyd liked Houston , school and city, almost immediately, even though he "still felt like: damn! Nobody in this world wants me," and even though his prized RX-7 was broken into and stripped of even its floor mats soon after he arrived. "I found that Houston was what Carl Lewis had told me it was," says Floyd. "That was good enough."

Floyd wasn't yet going out with Walton, but he had introduced himself to her at the April 1980 Penn Relays. She had responded by standing up and walking away. "She sure did," said Stanley, shaking his head at the memory as he and Walton sat side-by-side at the Ohio KC meet in Cleveland in February.

"Well, I thought you were giving me a line," said Walton. "I thought you had a lot of girl friends."