EUGENE, Oregon — Fred Kerley has an active Twitter account. In it, he explains why he’s very good at running fast.
I love what I do, he says. That’s why, he goes on, I’m confident in everything I do.
To know Kerley is to understand, indeed appreciate, that he is not obnoxiously confident. He is from small-town central Texas, and he has an understated humility. “Track and field has changed my life, coming from where I come from,” he said late Saturday. “Every day I get to run track, it’s a blessing.” All the same, no one gets to be best at the 100 meters, the most alpha of alpha male disciplines, without considerable self-esteem. In that Twitter account, in which he lets the public in, at least a little, into bits and pieces of the real him, Kerley returns time and again to the notion that greatness, by implication, his, cannot be denied.