Lovell’s first track champion: The remarkable life of Wayne Johnson

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a website that listed every Wyoming high school state track and field champion in state history. Like any retired coach with too many memories and too much curiosity, I started scrolling.

It brought back so many great memories. 

Names I had not thought about in years suddenly came rushing back. Athletes I coached. The kids I watched grow up. Runners I cheered for from the infield grass while pretending not to be nervous. Pole vaulters who scared me to death. Sprinters who floated across the finish line. 

Sports have a funny way of freezing moments in time. A name. A school. A mark beside it. Sometimes that is all that remains on paper of hundreds of hours of work, sacrifice and dreams.

As I dug deeper into the archive, I ran into the name: Wayne Johnson. 1963 - Lovell High School. 100-yard dash champion. 10.5 seconds.  Handheld time. Old stopwatches, I imagined.

Then I found him again. Wayne Johnson 1963 - Lovell High School. 220-yard dash champion. 22.5 seconds.

The “220” alone made me smile. For those old enough to remember, there was a time before meters took over track and field. The 220. The 440. The 880. Everything measured in yards. The kind of track era where cinders got in your shoes and coaches carried stopwatches around their necks like sacred instruments.

I kept scrolling through the years, event by event, name by name. And I noticed something. I could not find another Lovell state champion before Wayne Johnson in 1963. So I declared it, at least in my own mind, that Wayne Johnson was the first state track champion in Lovell High School history.

Immediately I wanted to know more.

Who was this guy? Where did life take him? Was he still alive? Did he remember those races? I posted on Facebook asking if anybody knew a Wayne Johnson who graduated from Lovell High School in 1963.

Apparently, my friends and Wayne Johnson’s friends do not run in the same circles.

So I did what I do best. I started digging.

Eventually, I found a 1963 Lovell High School yearbook. Wayne was listed as “Most Athletic” in his class. He played football, basketball and track. Then I discovered something even better.

That Lovell basketball team had won a state championship.

Now I was hooked.

Finally, after employing what I like to call my “top secret sleuthing skills,” I found a phone number connected to a property Wayne once owned in Cheyenne.

I sent a text. And to my surprise, he texted right back. I’m always impressed when 82-year-olds can text.

We arranged a phone interview for Memorial Day morning. And as soon as Wayne Johnson began talking, I realized the state championships were only a tiny chapter in a much larger Wyoming story.

A tough early life

Wayne was born into hardship almost immediately. His father died when Wayne was just 5 years old while working on an oil rig in Colorado.

“There was something that came loose on the drill floor and it hit him in the jugular vein, and he bled out really quickly,” Wayne told me quietly. “I was 5 years old at the time.”

His mother was suddenly left alone to raise Wayne and his two sisters during extremely difficult years.

“We were pretty poor,” he said matter-of-factly. “So we grew up in a poor home. And that was probably a blessing for me. I had to start working quite young.”

He hauled hay as a boy and learned early that life did not hand out much for free. But sports became an outlet.

“I thought that the world, the sun rose and set on a basketball,” Wayne said.

Long before Lovell became a consistent athletic power, Wayne and a remarkable group of classmates helped put the school on the map.

The names still echo through old yearbooks and newspaper clippings: Ralph Cockrell, Mike Kidgell, Lane Brown, Brent Burnham, Dave Gilstrap and Dale Fowler.

“We won 17 of our final games that we played,” Wayne remembered proudly.

Their basketball team won the state championship. Wayne insisted he was simply “the fifth man on the team,” but his teammates and coaches clearly valued him. “I was just a support guy,” he said modestly. “But I was on the starting five all the time.”

Wayne originally did not even want to play football. His coach, Dean Gerke, gave him a choice.

“He said, ‘Well, you can play basketball if you play football.’ And so I didn’t want to play football. But if he’s going to make me not play basketball, then I have to play football,” Wayne said.

It turned out to be a pretty good decision.

“The Lord blessed me with the ability to run,” Wayne said. “I can run pretty good.”

That may be one of the great Wyoming understatements of all time. Wayne became all-conference in football and then captured Lovell’s first known state track titles in the 100- and 220-yard dashes in 1963.

He still remembers the state competition, saying, “I knew I was pretty fast. Fastest in Class A.”

Another memory from his youth stayed with him for an entirely different reason.

Wayne told me about showing up for junior high basketball tryouts without shoes.

“The coach said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I got to go home. I don’t have any shoes.’” The coach stopped him. “He said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll get you some shoes if you’ll come back and play.’” Wayne paused for a second after telling me the story. “I’ve always appreciated that,” he said.

As a teacher, I thought about that moment for a long time after our conversation ended. A pair of shoes. One small act. One adult who noticed a kid. Sometimes that is all it takes to change the direction of a life.

After high school, Wayne attended Northwest Community College on a football scholarship during the final years the school still had a football program. His coach there, Harold Farmer, quickly learned Wayne could outrun just about anybody.

“He thought he was pretty fast,” Wayne said with a laugh. “So he said, ‘We’ll have a race between me and Johnson.’” Wayne won. “And so we all got to go in early from practice,” he laughed.

Then came Vietnam.

Wayne was drafted during the height of the war but chose to enlist instead.

“You might think that’s a really stupid thing to do,” he joked, “because when you enlist, you enlist for three years, and when you’re drafted, you only go for two.” He became an Army medic with the 9th Infantry Division and arrived in Vietnam in July 1967.

His description of combat was matter of fact, almost understated, the way many veterans of his generation speak.

“They shoot the first lieutenant and then they shoot the medic,” he said quietly. “That’s what they do in order to demoralize the group.”

Wayne believes his mother’s prayers protected him.

“She prayed very hard that I wouldn’t get killed in Vietnam,” he said. “I’m sure it was her prayers that saved me.”

He served during the Tet Offensive in 1968 and remembers leaving Saigon while parts of the city were still burning. Yet somehow, despite the danger surrounding him, Wayne survived the war without major physical injury.

“I have been blessed extremely,” he told me later in our conversation.

After returning stateside, Wayne attended church in Colorado Springs while stationed at Fort Carson, and a woman recognized him.

“That lady became my wife,” Wayne said. Her name was Becky Nicholls of Lovell. The two married in 1969 and eventually returned to the University of Wyoming, where Wayne completed a psychology degree.

That education, combined with his medical experience from the Army, led to a 33-year career with the State of Wyoming working in disability determination and developmental services. Some of the work he described was genuinely groundbreaking. Wayne helped move residents out of large state institutions and into community-based care programs throughout Wyoming.

“We did wonderful things,” he said. “We got them out of the training school.”

He also helped develop early hearing detection programs for infants.

“If you can get them while they’re still plastic, you can do something with a little kid,” he explained, referring to the brain’s early ability to adapt and develop. “If you wait until they’re 5 or 6, it’s too late.”

People like Wayne Johnson quietly changed lives all across Wyoming, most of them without ever receiving recognition for it.

Today Wayne and Becky live near Star Valley, surrounded by children, grandchildren and great memories. They raised seven children and now have 33 grandchildren.

At 82, Wayne still hikes, fishes and works on projects. He and Becky even grow oranges, lemons and tangerines in a greenhouse, in Star Valley.  I can only imagine it being covered in snow for eight months of the year.  

When I asked him if he thought he had lived a good life, he answered simply. “I would agree. Yes. I have been blessed extremely.”

And somewhere in an old Wyoming track archive, beside the year 1963, Wayne Johnson’s name still remains. 100-yard dash champion. 220-yard dash champion. The first Lovell state track champion anyone can find.

But after talking with him, those races almost feel like the smallest part of his story.

It never ceases to amaze me that every person has a story worth telling. Every life is unique. Sometimes all it takes is a little curiosity and a willingness to listen before you discover the struggles they endured, the sacrifices they made, the people they helped and the quiet ways they shaped the world around them. The more I interview people, the more grateful I become for the ordinary men and women who spent their lives doing meaningful things that most of us never even knew about.