Though all-state at football, track was his real love.
Hooker won more individual state track championships, eight, than anyone ever has. He ran the best 11 times ever posted by a prep athlete here in the 100-meter dash, the five best in the 200 meters. His times in the 100 and 400 meters were the nation's fastest.
Having seen Nureyev at the Opera House, Olga Korbut at Edmondson Pavilion, and Steve Prefontaine in Husky Stadium, I can say unequivocally that watching Ja'Warren Hooker at Star Track (the state prep title meet) in the Lincoln Bowl was no less impressive of an experience.
Hooker ran the 100 at night under the lights in a monsoon. As the scoreboard flashed his time, 10.00 in gold lights, spectators asked themselves if his feet even touched the ground and an exuberant competitor, who finished 15 feet back, exclaimed: "THIS WAS MY DREAM! TO RUN WITH JA'WARREN AT STATE!"
Another unforgettable scene occurred during the wheelchair race. A competitor stopped, exhausted. "Somebody ought to help him," Ja'Warren said, just before taking how own advice and jumping out the stands. Then, as MS victim Billy Harmon laughed and waved, Ja'Warren ducked his head down and gave him the ride of his life, and the crowd stood and cheered.
A few months before Ja'Warren had bought an angel pin for a cancer-stricken lady from Prosser who always came to his meets.
College coaches, both track and football, swooned over the prospect of Hooker on their team. Nebraska, Texas, Tennessee - almost every major college - offered him scholarships. But the prospect of Hooker playing football?
"That's a horrible thought," said a lady from Ellensburg at Startrack. "Kids think they're invincible, but mothers know different."
Hooker chose the University of Washington, for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which was the soccer star, Marisa Lyons, who first escorted him around campus during recruitment.
Then, on July 7, 1997, after a night discussing "where they would live and what their kids would be named," she died in his arms of cardiac arrhythmia.
Holding her teddy bear at the funeral, an ashen-faced Ja'Warren said he'd never been defeated in a race. "But Marisa beat me to heaven. I wish it had been a tie."
A month later Hooker showed up for the first day of football practice and proved he was the fastest football player in America with a 40-yard dash of 4.2 seconds. "Amazing," said classmate Marques Tuiasosopo.
"I wanted to live up to expectations," said Ja'Warren.
He touched the football for the first time in a game that fall in Tucson, catching the opening kickoff from Arizona on the Washington 11-yard line. As he slipped through a hole on the 30-yard line the same one word echoed throughout the Husky team along the sidelines: "GONE!"
In the 1997 season he touched the ball eight times and scored four touchdowns. Nobody could cover him. Why didn't they give him the ball more often? "That's what I wondered," he said.
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