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When it comes to the men's 110-meter high hurdles, all conversations begin and end with the same name: Renaldo Nehemiah. Though he no longer holds the world record, nor the American record, and though he never won an Olympic or World Championship gold medal, it still holds true that no other hurdler inspired the sense of awe that Nehemiah inspired. He is, was, and always will be, The Great One, The Master of the Art Form. I recently had the honor, the pleasure, the privilege, to speak with Renaldo about his hurdling career. Our conversation confirmed for me what I had always assumed to be true: that he is a great man, not just a great hurdler, and that his greatness as a hurdler was merely an extension of who he is as a person.

Before I begin the biographical portion of this profile, I have to say a few things for those of you out there too young to remember Nehemiah in his competitive days. Trust me, if you never saw him run, you really missed something special. I was fortunate enough to see his 12.93 world record race because my high school coach had taped it, and I can honestly say that watching that video almost brought me tears, it was so beautiful. I didn't even know who Nehemiah was at the time because I didn't really follow track very closely. But let me tell you, I could watch a million sunsets and never feel the completely overwhelming sense of awe that I felt while I was viewing that race. I distinctly remember two thoughts coming into my mind: 1) I want to learn how to do that, and 2) How does anybody get to be that good at what they do? No amount of words, no matter how eloquent or poetic, could do justice in describing the utterly breathtaking effortlessness with which Nehemiah ran the hurdles. Forget how fast he ran, forget how many times he broke the world record; the point I'm making here is that watching Nehemiah hurdle was like watching Van Gogh paint, like watching Miles Davis and John Coltrane perform on stage. It wasn't mere sport; it was art, in its highest form.