This long, involved, 800-meter tale had at its starting line Bill Cosby, 120 middle-school mathematicians, Southern Methodist University, a track meet near Dallas' Cotton Bowl stadium and a world record never rightfully bestowed upon a Connellsville and Pitt man seven decades ago.

This long John Woodruff tale reached a poetic ending three weeks ago amid Black History Month.

A breath-taking finish it was.

"Just seeing him, finally, after 70 years, getting the honor he so deserved ... ," began Melanie Hartsell, the Grand Prairie, Texas, math teacher who brought a portion of her Ronald Reagan Middle School students to the SMU ceremony exalting a man who never attended, let alone set foot on, that campus. "The only thing missing is the actual record."

Let's get back to that starting line, where this all began with a telephone call from a comedian.

Does SMU's Provost often get calls from the Jell-O Pudding Man?

"No," Thomas Tunks said over the telephone this week. "You could've knocked me over with a feather. This is the only time I have ever talked to Bill Cosby."

Seems the private institution had a relationship with Cosby after bestowing him an honorary doctorate degree and the chance to speak at the 1995 commencement. Cosby, a former Temple track athlete well familiar with Philadelphia's Penn Relays that Woodruff once dominated, called up Tunks in October and asked SMU to look into a particular Woodruff race: July 1937 at the Texas and Pan American Exhibition in Dallas' Fair Park. Woodruff, an African-American, won that race against world-record holder Elroy Robinson, who was white, and shattered Robinson's mark by 1.8 seconds, at 1:47.8. However, after engineers supposedly calibrated it within 1/1000th of an inch, Amateur Athletic Union officials measured the track at six feet short of specifications and disqualified Woodruff's record.

"I think what Cosby had in mind was that an injustice had been done," Tunks said. "How do you go back and uncover that kind of thing? We all can have our suspicions. But as the story unfolded, a lot of people around here were fascinated by it."

So were Hartsell's sixth- through eighth-graders after reading a Dallas Morning News column by James Ragland, whom Cosby also called. Her classes are 40 percent Hispanic, 30 percent Caucasian and 25 percent African-American. And they fell 100 percent for Woodruff's tale. "He's such a role model to us," she said.

This grandson of Virginia slaves served in World War II and the Korean War, rising to lieutenant colonel over an integrated battalion. He earned a degree at Pitt and a master's at New York University. He worked as a teacher, a welfare investigator, a parole officer and a rec-center director. In sum, he was a giant of a man in life, apart from the 10-foot stride, apart from the Olympic gold in which the 21-year-old Pitt freshman purposefully faded to the back so he could shift outside and win in front of 110,000 Nazis.

He is 91 years old now, bound to a wheelchair after the amputation of both legs, a resident of an Arizona assisted-living facility where his mostly white neighbors call him Long John still.

Hartsell's mathematicians determined the 1930s' Long John Woodruff could have loped across their classroom in one second. They attempted and failed to leap his 10-foot stride measured in floor tiles. They arrived at an equation, Distance equals Rate times Time, or DiRT. And the DiRT is: Woodruff's adjusted time for that race still would have beaten Robinson's record by a second and a half, at 1:48.2. Yet the AAU no longer supervises anything but youth events, and track's current governors shrug at long-gone records.

"The best thing to do, it seemed, was take a positive tack and not get in battles with the AAU; here's a man who has done great things, and not just on the track," Tunks said. So he and SMU started a $5,000 John Woodruff Scholarship awarded yearly to a Dallas high-school student for academics, athletics and leadership.

On Feb. 21, an absent Woodruff was celebrated amid SMU's Black History Month observance in Hughes-Trigg Student Center. The school president spoke about the scholarship, a former Dallas mayor read a Texas statehouse resolution calling him "an inspiration to all Americans," and Hartsell brought 30 students plus almost two dozen parents despite it being the school district's spring break. They all distinguished a Connellsville and Pitt man they never met and a record that may never come to be.

Still, a 70-year-old wrong was turned into something forever right. A passel of Texans are suddenly fans of an admirable 91-year-old, and for perpetuity young men and women in his name will attend a college to which he had no ties. "That's quite an honor," Woodruff said. That's a world record in itself.