When he was a kid, Stevenson Ranch resident Mark Crear wanted to be Jerry Rice, the three-time Super Bowl champion wide receiver of the San Francisco 49ers. But Crear, 56, said he didn’t grow up in an environment that was conducive to fulfilling dreams like that.
Crear came from an emotionally and physically abusive household. Asked if he played sports in the street, he said, “This wasn’t ‘Leave It to Beaver.’” The streets where he grew up were dangerous. And his upbringing took him all over the place.
“I went to five elementary schools in six years,” he said during a recent telephone interview. “And three high schools in four years.”
During his senior year at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, a campus security guard and assistant track coach named Frank reached out to Crear and suggested he consider joining the track team. It was a gut feeling he had about Crear. Frank’s faith in Crear gave him some confidence, and he said he didn’t have much of that. Growing up, Crear was very insecure.
He describes his thoughts of the time in his 2010 autobiography, “Why My Silver Is Gold.”
“At the very least, I can see some girls in tights,” he wrote of the idea of joining the track team. “After all, I was going through puberty at this stage. Because Frank was a hurdler, he convinced me to try hurdling. I’ll never forget the freedom I felt as I soared over those first few hurdles. This feeling was something that I had never experienced before; a feeling that no one could steal from me.”
The better Crear got at hurdling, he said, the more he loved doing it. Frank and his wife, Lorelei, would become family to Crear. The couple took Crear into their home. They fed him and took him to the doctor if he got hurt. Crear said they were the first people in his life to treat him as if he actually mattered. Their reaching out to him, he said, was life-changing.
Not only was Frank a coach to Crear, but he’d also play pool, basketball and dominoes with him. Frank became not only a coach to Crear, but, he said, also a father, a brother and a true friend.
“The only thing I wanted back then was a hand up,” Crear said. “I never wanted a handout. Sometimes all you need is that person to believe in you and that person to invest in you.”
In high school, during the 1987 CIF California State Meet, Crear finished second in the 300-meters hurdles and fourth in the 110-meters hurdles. Despite such successes, however, colleges, Crear said, weren’t chasing him down.
With Frank’s guidance, Crear eventually pursued track and field at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. He began in the fall of 1987, and he took a job with UPS so he could pay for an apartment.
He spent two years at Mt. SAC. He worked hard, he said. In his book, he equated his work at UPS to boot camp, performing backbreaking tasks as an unloader.
“(M)anagers would yell at you to work hard,” he wrote, “and you had to meet a certain package count in order to go home. Often times I would arrive at work wearing my track uniform because I had just run in a competition. I didn’t even have time to take a shower. Not that it mattered. Everyone else smelled musty just like I did.”
Upon completing his two years at Mt. SAC, Crear got into USC. He received a full athletic scholarship. It was during his time there that he dominated in his sport, winning both PAC 10 and NCAA championships, and setting the USC record in the 110-meters hurdles.
Crear graduated from USC in 1992. Coming off his NCAA victory, he felt confident that he could compete in the Olympics.
“The Olympics is not an easy feat,” Crear said. “It’s not being the fastest in your school or the fastest in your city, or even the fastest in the league. You can be the fastest in the league and still not make it. What about the state of California? Well, to make it to the Olympics, you don’t have to be the fastest in the state. You have to be in the top three in the whole United States. That’s a lot of butt-kicking. That’s a lot of people that you’ve got to pass up. That’s a lot of focus, that’s a lot of discipline, a lot of dedication and determination.”
To be successful, Crear said he relied on what he called the three P’s: permission, passion and purpose. He said he had to give himself permission to pursue his goals. At the time, he sometimes felt he had imposter syndrome, that he didn’t belong among the best of the best in the world at his sport. He had to embrace his passion. And he had to act with purpose.
He added that his faith had to be greater than someone else’s doubt. He never let the fact that, at times, he didn’t have money or a place to sleep put doubt in his mind. Sometimes his meals came in the form of samples at shopping mall food courts or were complimentary dishes at restaurants because it was his birthday. He joked that his birthday was sometimes more than once a year.
And while Crear wasn’t attending College of the Canyons, he trained on the campus. Because he was a championship athlete, he also got paid for speaking engagements to talk to other athletes, companies and churches, to share his story.
Crear invested in himself. He read about better nutrition and better mental health. He was always trying to better himself.
In October 1994, he moved to the Santa Clarita Valley. Around this time, Crear was training hard for the 1996 Olympics. He shared one particularly unfortunate experience in his book:
“About two weeks before the games, I decided to complete one more workout at UCLA,” he wrote. “It was my last set, and I was fatigued going over those last few hurdles. I caught my leg on one of the 42-inch wooden hurdles, and as I reached out with my left arm to break my fall, I heard a crack and fell.”
That crack was the sound of his arm breaking.
Crear would go on to compete with that broken arm and still win a silver medal in the 110-meters hurdles. He’d follow that up in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, with the bronze medal, this time battling a double hernia that he’d suffered during previous training.
“The broken arm was painful enough,” he said. “But one of the things I pride myself on is being a drug-free athlete and an advocate of drug-free athletics. Here again, I let my faith be greater than any doubt. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That was more painful than a broken arm. Every step was like getting stabbed with a knife. That’s why I say my silver was gold. That bronze was gold, too.”
In addition to Crear’s athletic achievements, he has a master’s degree in counseling, and he’s also an ordained minister. He’s done a travelling ministry and occasionally does faith-based counseling through the American Association of Christian Counselors.
About six years ago, Crear moved from the SCV to the San Fernando Valley and then to Stockton in Northern California for work. At the end of 2024, he planned to move back down to Southern California to take care of his mom, who was ill and living in the Antelope Valley. She died before he relocated.
Crear is married, and he and his wife have a daughter, who’s on West Ranch High School’s track and field team. Since he returned to the SCV, he’s been working as the director of the Employee Training Institute at COC, which offers workplace training and education to businesses, municipalities and governmental agencies. He additionally assists young athletes on the West Ranch High School and COC track teams, offering the kind of mentorship he so needed in his own life to accomplish his lofty goals.
“It’s so important to invest in people,” Crear said, “especially the youth and the community, because you never know. You might have that diamond in the rough. You might have that person who just needs that little bit of reaching out.”
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
