Numbers don’t do Tubotein Taylor’s speed justice.
To understand just how fast this kid is, watch him dust all comers.
He’s had plenty to run from in his 24 years. Injuries, homelessness, doubters and depression.
But like the finish lines at the end of his races, Taylor’s made a habit of running full speed through obstacles.
“Everything that’s gone on in my life has taught me to take everything one day at a time,” he said. “God’s got plans for everybody. I thought I was going to be in the NFL right now.”
A veteran sprinter by way of Canyon High and Fullerton College, Taylor returned to the track this season after a four-year absence and won everything there was to win.
Later this summer, he’ll attempt to win gold for Nigeria at the Rio 2016 Olympics.
“I’ve been hurt in practice, hurt in so many different ways, it’s hard for me to say I’m going to do it,” he said of competing in August. “I can say it, believe it 100 percent. But every runner will tell you that you never know what’s going to happen.
“I’ve had too much go on in my life to jump the gun.”
***
Taylor fought a lot as a kid, earning suspensions from elementary school for misbehavior.
His parents divorced when he was in second grade. He said only later did he understand how “parents go through things and sometimes people can’t put up with other people’s stuff.”
Woefully shy growing up in Corona, Taylor had few friends. As often as his family moved, he didn’t have much time to make new ones.
Sports became a getaway. Baseball, first, then football.
“I’d get in trouble in school, and I’d go to football and all my problems were gone,” he said.
Taylor played running back and middle linebacker through his Pop Warner apprenticeship. In junior high, he added track to his extracurriculars.
After being El Rancho Charter School’s Athlete of the Year as an eighth grader, Taylor joined Canyon’s football program in 2006.
While he broke his collarbone as a sophomore on varsity, he healed fully by spring and ran track.
“Watching his stride, his rhythm, he just looked like a natural,” remembered Dreux Valenti, then Canyon’s first-year coach. “Raw, but naturally talented. First time I saw him run, I knew there was something special there.”
Taylor in 2008 broke Lanny Carter’s 56-year-old Orange Unified School District 400-meter dash record.
OCVarsity that year named him an All-Orange County sprinter.
At one point the following season, Taylor held the state’s 200-meter mark. His 47.73 in the 400 remains an O.C. Championships record.
Taylor retained his all-county spot as a senior, and graduated from Canyon in 2009 as its Male Athlete of the Year.
“Football is a team sport, and track, it’s a team sport, but it’s mostly individual,” said Taylor, whose mother beat pancreatic cancer his senior year. “When you run, you have a number behind your name and everybody sees that. They see the time, and that’s a representation of you.
“I took running seriously because I didn’t want to look bad to anybody.”
***
Out of Canyon, Taylor received a football scholarship to Idaho State University.
Four plays into a scrimmage during his first week of practice, he broke his ankle in a freak accident. Injured and depressed, his grades plummeted.
Taylor said without football, he had no identity. Still shy as a college freshman, homesickness consumed him.
Eventually, he was stripped of his scholarship and dismissed from school.
Back home in 2010, Taylor enrolled at Fullerton College in the fall and caught two passes in four games on the football team.
Clerical confusion with his residency papers kept him from re-enrolling in the spring. So he attended Santiago Canyon College for a semester and red-shirted on the track team.
He returned to Fullerton in 2011.
While Taylor attended school and played football, his family was evicted from its home.
The recession had doomed Taylor’s mother’s and stepfather’s small businesses, forcing them to live in a hotel. Taylor slept on the floor for months.
“I put my full-time effort into football,” he said. “I kept going. I figured I’d need another scholarship to go to college.”
Taylor scored four times for Fullerton in 2011 and gained 625 yards of total offense. The Hornets finished with a 5-5 record.
Then first-year track coach John Bolton had heard of Taylor’s speed, but only after watching the diminutive kick returner’s film did he pitch to Taylor running sprints in the spring.
“It took him time to come out,” said Bolton, now the sprints coach at Walnut’s Mt. San Antonio College. “But he came out eventually and started dominating.”
Track success at Fullerton notwithstanding, Taylor accepted a football scholarship to Maryland’s Morgan State University.
For three years, Taylor attended Morgan State, lettering twice and graduating in 2015 with a degree in speech communications.
Not long after receiving his diploma, he received a text from Bolton.
Mt. SAC’s track and field team had won the 2015 state championship. Bolton sent Taylor a picture of the championship ring.
***
Rather than take a temp job in Irvine once back home, Taylor enrolled in fall classes at Mt. SAC to gain eligibility for track season.
He trained under Bolton in the offseason, all the while preparing to participate in Morgan State’s pro day – a showcase for the school’s football players to work out for NFL scouts.
In February, at the UC Irvine Spring Break Invitational, Taylor strained his hamstring running the 4-by-100 relay.
“I felt my football days starting to become numbered,” he said.
Taylor returned to health later in the spring, and set a personal best of 47.65 in the 400 at the Southern California prelims.
One week later, at the Southern California finals, he re-set that mark at 46.62.
“In track, dropping a second is hard,” Taylor said. “A 0.5 is hard to drop. I couldn’t believe that I did. Then, I started thinking I can go 45 (seconds). I can go faster.”
Prior to the SoCal finals, Bolton broached to Taylor the possibility of running for Nigeria’s Olympic team.
Taylor’s mother, Ene, is a native of the country and a former high school runner. Many of her family members still live in West Africa.
Taylor eventually received dual citizenship, and his 400 time qualified him for the team.
“That’s when I started taking sprinting seriously,” he said. “I sacrifice every single time, and every time, I get hurt or something happens, and I can’t get out of this hole. When I was told I finally got out of it, when J.B. told me that, I was really happy.
“It’s an opportunity one in a million people can say they did.”
Last month, Taylor won the state championship in the 400 – Mt. SAC’s first such titlist in nearly 40 years.
The Mounties swept the sprinting portion of the event and, for the first time since the 2001 and 2002 seasons, repeated as California Community College Athletic Association state champs.
“Words can’t explain how this season was,” Taylor said.
***
It’s a recent Monday afternoon, and Taylor, Bolton and Cravon Gillespie enter Mt. SAC’s weight room.
While Bolton writes the day’s lifting schedule on a whiteboard, Taylor and Gillespie trade stories.
In the spring, the two anchored Bolton’s sprints juggernaut.
Now, they’re training for the Olympics.
“Knowing I have somebody as good as myself, competing day in and day out, he’s another mentor to me, another coach,” said Gillespie, a 19-year-old sprinter bound for the University of Oregon on a track scholarship who’ll attempt to qualify for the U.S. team at this month’s Olympic Trials.
“We’re always competing with each other, and we both want to win, but we’re getting each other better.”
After completing Bolton’s weight lifting regimen, Taylor heads up to the football field. He throws headphones on and begins stretching.
Bolton’s summer workouts don’t last long. Don’t have to. Sprinting, he said, is best tailored meticulously.
On this day, Taylor runs intermediate sprints with rests in between. He later runs two 350-meter dashes while pulling a 13-pound weight on a sleigh.
Two hours after hitting the weight room, Taylor’s Monday workout is over.
“His preparation, work ethic, is awesome,” Bolton said. “All focus, man. He takes care of business. He busts his butt on the track, in the weight room.”
Taylor left for Africa on Sunday, returning to his mother’s homeland for the first time in two decades.
He’s competing at the South African Championships, a track meet used by Nigerian coaches to assess their Olympic runners.
From South Africa, Taylor will fly to Nigeria for a July meet.
He’ll return home soon after to train for August’s Olympic Games.
“Sometimes I wonder where track would’ve gotten me had I gotten a track scholarship out of high school,” he said. “But that’s in the past now, and I’m always looking forward to the next step. This is my next step.
“I want to prove to everyone, prove to myself, that I have what it takes to compete with some of the best runners in the world.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7724 or bwhitehead@ocregister.com
