Maureen Morrison pauses mid-thought, temporarily halting the interview in reaction to what her coach just mouthed as she walked past.
“Oh yeah?” Mo says. “Yeeeaaahhh!”
And then, in explanation: “The hammer time on Saturday changed.”
Indeed, the women’s hammer throw, originally slated to start at 10:30 a.m. at Saturday’s Oregon Invitational, was rescheduled to begin instead at 3:30 p.m. in an effort to encourage more people to watch. Because this event is going to be an event.
Mo is ranked fifth in Saturday’s field behind Canada’s Caroline Wittrin and Utah State’s Gloria Butler, who are ranked first and second, respectively.
Naturally, the best female hammer thrower in Oregon history is excited. She’ll be up against good competition. She won’t have to get out of bed so early. And she’ll be able to do her thing in front of a crowd, taking advantage of the energy that it provides.
Mo’s ready to kick ass.
It’s an ideal opportunity for Mo to continue to close on a slot at the NCAA Championships, and on that vaunted All-American status. And, yes, in the process, on yet another personal and program record too.
Twice this season Mo has reset the school hammer throw record. Heidi Fisk, a recent graduate, held the old record of 183-feet, 6-inches. But Mo undid her friend’s mark for the first time at the Hayward Relays on April 8 with a mighty fling of 185-9.
Then the 21-year-old redshirt junior did it again last weekend, this time throwing 186-06 and helping the Ducks win their dual against Washington.
“I don’t really think about, ‘If I throw this, I’m going to shatter the record,’” Mo said. “It’s more personal goals: becoming an All-American, working hard, being disciplined, and if I shatter records in the process … then hey.”
Hey, why not? Because until her sophomore year at Oregon, Maureen Morrison didn’t even consciously intend to throw the hammer.
Though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to happen.
After all, Mo began throwing — discus and shot put, anyway — early.
“In high school my sister threw,” Mo says. “One day I wanted to go home, but she had the car. So I was stuck. She said we could leave if I could throw farther than she did. So I picked it up and threw it farther.
“I was like, ‘We gotta go now.’”
When high school began in Manhattan Beach, Calif., Mo’s sports were soccer first, then basketball and volleyball. The nation’s current No. 24 hammer thrower didn’t even like track.
But eventually it caught on. And Mo, then a resident of Seattle, gained a reputation for her prowess with the discus, finishing second in the state of Washington her senior season.
“Discus is what allured [throws coach] Sally [Harmon] to start recruiting me,” Mo says. “Discus carried me here.”
She arrived in 1996 a talented, young discus thrower hindered by ankle injuries. Pains that didn’t and wouldn’t go away, keeping her from fulfilling her full potential in the discus. But she persevered and made an appearance in the Pacific-10 Conference Championships.
And in the meantime, she threw the hammer, oh, five times that year.
The ankles were worse the next season and would require more than one surgery. The rugged, grinding nature of the discus made it so painful that Mo began to experiment more with the hammer.
That sophomore season she finished seventh in the Pac-10 in the hammer (168-4) and sixth in the discus (166-9).
“Mo is a neophyte,” Harmon says. “She didn’t really pick up the hammer until her sophomore year, when she was in atrocious pain trying to learn a new event.”
She spent what was supposed to be her junior season unhappily watching the meets with fellow redshirting junior Karis Howell, the Ducks’ top javelin thrower. The two were able to comfort each other. And Mo promised herself that she’d make the rest of her career special.
“It was really tough,” Mo says. “I’d go to meets and bawl, go home so upset. [But] It was definitely motivational, it made me think, ‘I have two years left, so I better make something of it.’”
This is what, besides breaking records, Oregon’s finest hammer thrower is doing with her comeback season:
Being a big sis.
“We have ‘little sisters’ on the team now,” Mo explains. “It would have been nice to have as a freshman, to have someone tell you what you should expect.
“[This year’s freshmen] are all very innocent. I don’t remember being that innocent when I got here. But they’re like my little sisters, really. They’re so crazy, they’re so energetic, they’re so hyper.”
Mary Etter, one of those oh-so-innocents, clearly appreciates Mo’s presence on the team.
“Mo’s the biggest punk,” Etter joked after the discus competition April 22. “Sometimes I just want to beat her down — no, I love her to death. She’s great.”
But it doesn’t stop there. This is what else Oregon’s top hammer thrower has been doing:
Improving her natural rhythm. Trying to implement all the intricacies of the hammer. And learning the event with Harmon, who was the Ducks’ first individual national champion in 1981– in the javelin.
“The whole principle is to get this little mass to rotate faster and faster around you,” Harmon elucidates. “If you throw a little extra movement in, it shortens the line of power, the path of the ball and how fast it can gyrate. It’s a constant dance, like a polka in a way, something’s always flying out and coming back in … it may look graceful but there are some kinesthetic demands on your middle ear as centrifugal forces pull you out…”
Or as Mo, a biology/psychology student, puts it: “A four-turn, four-beat, heel-toe spin.”
And Mo’s still persisting. Even after she missed practice for the entire week preceding last Saturday’s dual to go home and deal with a family crisis.
“I called Sally that Thursday,” Mo says. “And I asked her, ‘Will I be able to compete, because I know I’ve been gone and it won’t be fair to other people to take off a week and come back?’ And she said, ‘We need the points.’ So I knew I needed to get my ass in gear.”
She set the latest record. And she placed second in the discus.
She’s also still enduring the pains in her ankles.
“It’s going to be her Achilles heel for life,” Harmon says. “But it’s also going to be the thing that she draws her strength from.”
Coach Harmon and her star thrower are very much on the same page.
“I don’t ever think I’ve had a clear-sailing year,” Mo says. “There’s always been a couple of things. But that’s what makes you work harder. Not only does it make your accomplishments seem greater, but it gives you better self-esteem when you can overcome and still come out looking pretty OK, not too dirty.”
Chances are, she’ll do just that starting at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday.